I’m worried about Dee, she is back on heroin. She uses a needle. I fell in love with her a while back but I do that with everyone all the time, it gets me in trouble over and over but my soul is a wild animal and it is far bigger than my body and I am lucky that however destructive I am my creativity still outruns my destructiveness because were that not the case I’d have died long ago. Dee is a real person but I’m using fake names for her and everyone else I write about. Dee is about thirty and I first met her through Angie who I first met on the shuttle that goes between where I live out west of the Tucson Mountains in an area I think of as The Perimeter to the bus station on the south side of Tucson which I think of as The Tatooine Interzone District of America. The two fantasy names are references to some Doors lyrics and the book Naked Lunch respectively. I love Naked Lunch though I hear some people consider it problematic. My friend Kerry drives the shuttle on the afternoon shift. I’ll get back to her eventually. But so I met Dee through Angie and I met Angie at the south side bus station and chatted her up because I recognized her from the shuttle. Angie and Dee met in prison and were prison besties. So the first time I took Angie out to lunch we went to Miss Saigon which is downtown by the Ronstadt Transportation center named for the Ronstadt family from which the best known member is Linda Ronstadt who notably covered Warren Zevon’s Carmelita which has a chorus about being strung out on heroin on the outskirts of town. But so Angie asked if Dee could come along and Dee came along because Dee is more streetsmart than Angie and a better judge of if a man is a hustler or a predator or good people. So we get lunch at Miss Saigon together and I have money from some ghostwriting I’d done. I had to write for other people because I had such a bad reputation because I’m a scary crazy (not sympathetic crazy but scary crazy) uncivilized savage. I was still living outside in a tent out in the Sonoran Desert in The Perimeter at this point but I was on the verge of renting a room and living indoors like a respectable white now that I had some money. Eventually the ghost writing would run dry and I would end up doing robberies and selling cocaine and getting rich briefly but I’ll get back to that.
So Angie had brought Dee to kind of evaluate me. Like I said they’d met in prison and become very close friends there. They both had a history of shooting heroin but were clean when I met them. I fell in love with Dee early on but did not say anything about it or act on it for a long time out of concern for Angie. But so Dee kind of interviewed me. She says she used to turn tricks on the south side and in South Tucson. South Tucson is a small independent municipality which is completely surrounded by Tucson and is to the north of most of the south side. It is poor and the population is mostly minority with a lot of indigenous and Mexicans as well as black people and a lot of homeless people. I said oh I know South Tucson well and I know a lot of street people. I know drug people and sex workers. So Dee cocked her head and squinted like Blondie in the old spaghetti westerns and asked me: Oh yeah? Who do you know? But like I don’t really know how to respond because I dont know too many names I just know people by sight and from small talk at the bus stops and the St Vincent Depaul thrift store. But I had lived with an escort who loved drugs and that was Evilynn, Evil for short. That is her chosen name, she had it legally changed. She is transgender. She also goes by the name Tran sometimes. She is Vietnamese. But so I mentioned her not expecting it to mean anything. But Dee was like oh I know her! which was surprising. It turned out that Dee had been cellmates with Nora, the woman who had first taught Evil to smoke meth and turn tricks. Evil had actually taught me to smoke meth, which like, you actually vape it technically but whatever. That could be fun, though meth will do a number on you. I’m savage and psychotic enough without that. But so like this gave me credibility. I was like, yeah I dated a transgender sex worker of color for the woke points and we all had a laugh even though none of us could tell if I was joking or serious. I’d have to distance myself from Evil later on because she began to resemble her own name to a troubling degree and was getting arrested for domestic violence and sexual misdemeanors and years of constant meth and fentanyl use had made her crazier. She was very intelligent and had a computer science degree and we loved talking about mathematics and science but she changed a lot in the years that I knew her. But so anyway that impressed Dee and that was a couple years ago. Now I am worried about her because she has gone back to shooting heroin. She was supposed to check into rehab this past week but you can’t count on that until it happens you know.
All the people I’ve mentioned have had real difficult lives. Angie is doing well now. She has a job helping homeless people and addicts. She drinks and uses meth and has prescriptions for sleeping pills and ADHD meds but she doesnt shoot heroin anymore. She’d been a hardcore junky for 15 years and had been involved in the criminal underworld. She’d been widowed when her husband was shot and killed by police during an attempted robbery of a check cashing place over by Grant and Oracle which is a corner I use in my cover version of Carmelita by Warren Zevon and which is also where Nora first took Evil to score meth back in the day. It is less busy of a drug spot than it once was but you can still score there. I should text Angie and see if she is okay. She was in a car accident recently, she drives like a maniac. And she has also been ill in her stomach lately. I worry that the stomach illness may be a front for side effects of heroin relapse but I am not ready to jump to that conclusion though she has been letting Dee stay with her. That has gotten gnarly recently though because Angie lives with her mom and stepdad in a retirement community with strict rules and Dee recently nodded off in her car with the light on recently while parked where too many people could see and that meant Angie was in trouble.
I haven’t messaged Angie yet today I want to check on her. She and I have a good relationship, I spent Christmas with her family. I messaged with Fatima though, an ex girlfriend of mine, a brilliant oil painter who is quadriplegic and paints holding the brush in her mouth. She was first paralyzed at 19 by a gunshot to the neck after kicking heroin and moving across country to get well but she was in a car with someone else who got shot and killed and she took a bullet to the neck. She is my age, 48, so she has been quadriplegic almost 30 years. She is very intelligent and likes my music. I wasn’t a good boyfriend to her when we were together, I’m a scary crazy not sympathetic crazy and I was even more savage back then. But after ten years or so of not talking we started talking again. That has been one of the more uplifting developments of the past few years for me. I talked to her about Emilio who I saw today on my walk to the gas station for some iced coffee. Emilio is a dark skinned Navajo who lives outside near where I used to live outside in the camps on the Bureau of Land Management land by the corner of West Ajo and Camino Verde. I live inside now but we became friends while we were neighbors in the camps. Emilio was abandoned in a ladies bathroom in a Catholic Church at the age of two and as he tells it at the age of 2 he had a vision of the angel Gabriel in the bathroom there. Emilio believes the he is from outer space and that he is Jesus Christ and Mohammed as well. When I saw him he was pulling a cart with a Quran and a Bible in it. He gave me some weed, he is always generous with me. We talked about martial arts and Chinese medicine. Blood meridians and the like. He explained to me how to grow magic mushrooms. He is very eccentric and kinda crazy but he is kind and generous and we have great conversations. I told him I’d been getting very good at walking on my toes all the time like a cat. He understood immediately why one might do that. It builds strength in the calves and allows for very quiet movement and quick bursts over short distances. Cats do walk on their toes that is why I believe polydactylity will prove adaptive and that polydactyl cats will be the norm among felines within a few hundred years which is not very long in evolutionary time. I texted Fatima about my encounter with Emilio. I also texted Magdalena, who is a casual girlfriend. She is transgender and I met her through Evil who lived with her for a while but who became abusive. That was part of her tendency to become her own name. Usually I support transgender women becoming their own names but Evil is the exception to that rule. Magdalena is Mexican with what I think of as indigenous features: short stature and dark skin. She does not like sex work that much, she mostly likes smoking (vaping really) blues (fentanyl) and listening to podcasts. She believes in conspiracy theories. She believes the world is flat. She is nice to me and cares about me and I try to take care of her a little. I helped her get out of the motel she was living in so she wouldn’t have to work as much. Sex work as Magdalena and Dee have experienced it is traumatic and undesirable and not hip and stylish as it is often portrayed online on Twitter and Instagram and such. But there are big differences between turning tricks for dope money in meatspace and selling nudes and camming online. I would not disparage anyone personally for doing that kind of work but with people who experience the traumatic version I sometimes try to take care of them. I am a very loving person even though I am also an emotionally unstable and occasionally violent scary person. A land of contrasts if you will. I contain pulchritudes and multitudes I contradict myself with my vicissitudes. I can be attitude and beatitude at once. If this puzzles you I can identify because it puzzles me as well. Yes I’ve been through years of therapy as an individual as well as the state mandated group shit for violent drug offenders.
I hope that Dee has checked in. I still like her I want to start a family with her and I dont know why. I’m insane. People are actually very mysterious and the common explanations really don’t explain much. People use buzzwords involving diagnoses and neurotransmitters and pop psychology but it doesn’t really resonate with me. I study classic literature and that is where I find the inroads to the truths of my soul. From Homer and Aeschylus and the Bible and the gnostics and Lao Tzu and the Vedas and The Upanishads and The Sutras and The Eddas and from the stories of Saints and Prophets and from Shakespeare and Cervantes and Rabelais and Melville and Dostoevsky and Faulkner and Garcia Marquez. And I walk among plants and animals and I see that I, a savage, am one of them and that they, like me, have distinct and sacred personalities whose roots reach deep down into a beautiful and unfathomable mystery. I have bills to pay. I stopped doing robberies and selling cocaine because it was ruining my life. I gave away tens of thousands of dollars to transgender women and indigenous people and rape survivors. I am glad to be free of my wealth in a way but I wish I had just enough for July rent. I love my friends. These are all real people, we are all made of each other woven in a web where if one of us moves or is moved the rippled vibrate throughout the entire fabric. And within each node in the web can be found the nature and shape of the entire web. Atman is Brahman. As above so below. Within you without you. The universe is one vast soul and every soul is a universe unto itself and every body in the universe has a soul. It is like Indra’s net. Indra the great warrior god of the Indo-Aryan vedas. Indra is real. I am almost done with my audio book of the Iliad. Life is an oddessey. I hope Dee has checked in. I should stop writing and play some music, it will be good for my soul. Thanks for reading.