Pain Killers by Jerry Stahl

I’d stopped talking. But I was a professional: I knew how to make a flake-out look like a pause.
    “One time I came to with a couple of clips missing from my nine. This time there was a puddle of blood in the backseat. But I never got that knock on the door.”
    I looked at each of them individually, wrinkling my forehead to signify depth.
    “You know the knock I’m talking about. Like when you drive home in a blackout and next day your bumper’s bashed in, and there’s a flattened high heel trailing panty-hose stuck to the front tire. You’re scared and hungover, so what do you do? What do you think you do? You stick the hoopty in the garage or steal some license plates from a Denny’s parking lot to switch up. Hit-and-run’s a total loser crime,” I said, looking at Mengele, who was in there for it. “Scum of the earth. But some people have no self-control.”
    What was I doing, trying to flush out a mass murderer with vehicular manslaughter insults? I rubbed a hand over my stubble and winced at the eau de trailer on my fingers. I didn’t need a shower as much as I needed steam-cleaned.
    Roscoe, who thus far had said nothing, regarded me mildly. Nonjudgmental. Which only made me feel more judged.
    “Why am I standing here telling you the demented shit I did?”
    “’Cause you demented?” offered Andre, AKA Reverend D.
    Half-faced Davey glared. I noticed that his eyelashes were thick as Bambi’s, as if in compensation for the tragedy underneath.
    “Guys,” I soldiered on, “demented is five flights up from where I was. Sometimes it still is, but that’s a different story….”
    Silence. Neurosis didn’t play well in the penitentiary.
    Cranky piped up. “C’mon, homes, you a cop.” Every few words he had to stop to grind his teeth and chew his lips. “Cops are your gang.”
Chew. Grind.
“They ain’t gonna snitch you off.”
Grind, grind.
“And it ain’t like you gonna kick the door down and cuff your own white ass.”
Grind, grind. Chew chew grind chew.
    “You sound kinda pissed, Cranky. So, you ever had a problem with drugs?”
    “My name is Ernesto, mang. I’m Cranky with my family.”
    “Me too,” I said, “and the Lexapro didn’t help. I still hated them. Shit’s supposed to be an antidepressant. But how can you not be depressed when the shit turns your dick into a doorbell?”
    Shut the fuck up!
I screamed at myself in my head, then wondered if I’d been talking out loud.
    It didn’t matter, at least not to Cranky. He’d twisted around to make sure Rincin was listening, giving me the chance to admire the fresh “XIII” inked on the back of his head. For the thirteenth letter of the alphabet. M.
La eMe.
Which had just made doing meth a beat-down offense.
    “Here’s the deal,” I said, my voice low so it would sound serious, if not entirely coherent. “You want to stop using, you have to find out why you started. You got to look at all the shit you got high ’cause you couldn’t face….”
    Then the white Rasta threw down a challenge. “This is just me, Jimmy, talkin’. But I didn’t get high for none of that, man. I got high ’cause I liked fuckin’ two hos all night with that chronic and cocaine. And some Hennessy for when the sun come up.”
    “That’s what I’m talkin’ about,” echoed Reverend D. “’Cept you should lose the alcohol, son. Womens you can enjoy till you eighty, but you gots to lose the booze. Man, I had this little Chinese girl once—”
    “Hold that thought, Rev.” I knew I had to chime back in or lose the semblance of control. “What I wanna know, Jimmy, is how you felt when you
couldn’t
get the hos or the drugs.” This sounded school-marmy, even to me. I was so ill prepared I was defaulting to Nancy Reagan. I had spent all my time on Mengele. But if anybody asked about real-skin Nazi sex dolls, I’d be all over it.
    Jimmy threw his arms out and mugged for the class. “Look at this face. Dude, I always got the hos and the drugs.