My Cousin Benny and I Have A Falling Out
Girls in blue dresses placed me in a space between life and death
What the fuck is going on?
I’m looking at a drop ceiling and a bunch of people I don’t know in a room I don’t recognize. I can’t move much. Someone has seen fit to tether my extremities to this metal construct. I don’t know what in the name of Christ they think is going on, but clearly I have been released from one hell into the next.
My mind was a barely functional circuit board with two thoughts only.
- How to get out of this confinement and smoke a cigarette like any decent, God fearing citizen would?
- Where the hell is Dana?
As I mulled over these questions, the answer began to take over the hookworms and push its way through to my frontal lobe. The Xanax. The fucking Xanax. At this time, I had only one girl in my life. She truly was the heroine that everyone said she was. Rarely would I stray from her.
However, if she was out of town and we couldn’t see each other for more than 12–24 hours, that may cause me to drift on over to her cousin Benny’s house. He always had girls around that would help you relax, pass out, black out, and fall out.
I had the lovely Xanax to keep me company throughout the harsh evening in New York . If you don’t know her, she’s just who you want to have with you on a hard day’s night. She helps you to feel that there is nothing, not a thing, that has meaning aside from your blankets. Nothing real exists to make you feel stress. These girls always seemed to be shacked up in Dana’s purse.
They wore blue dresses and came and went easy. That night, they took with them part of my consciousness as well as a small part of my immediate future.
The moment I convinced the nurse I was not suicidal, she finally let me use the restroom unattended. Out came the bag with the spoon, the rig, and the grey powder I worshipped. I mixed up another dose of Pepsi, even though I was still beyond fucked up after the Narcan wore off, and let it loose to wrap me ever tighter in its wooly warmth and embrace. When I left the restroom I was careful to hide the rig behind a poster in the ER.
As time passed, I began to realize this was not going to be two or three hours of the hospital typing up bills whilst depriving me of precision nicotine. This would be a 72-hour squeeze. I spotted the nurse who was there when I came careening in to disrupt her graveyard shift. Despite her pleasant demeanor, she informed me I had screamed at her and kicked her when I came in. The doctors had even called my mother, which I found odd since I didn’t have a phone. I hadn’t even two tin cans connected by a string.
Since they assumed this was an attempt to take my life, they proceeded to hook me up to monitors and perform a multitude of tests I still to this day have never paid for. On the second day, one of the doctors came in to do a sonogram on my heart.
He smeared his cold jelly and proceeded to inform me that I had some kind of heart condition that needed attention from a specialist. He emphasized that I my “high risk” lifestyle made it especially vital to seek medical attention.
He stared at me as if attempted to drill his words into me with laser vision and said, “You are less than 25 years old. If you do not see someone to get this under control, you will see consequences.”
I internally contested his advice with my argument that the amount of drugs in my body today were scant compared with my usual stabbing of 4 or 5 bundles into my veins on any given day.
It was the Xanax that brought me to this place. Benny’s ladies tend to do that. They get mixed up with the guys partying in my bloodstream. The next thing you know, everyone is all mixed together in a big messy pile and the house, which is my body, becomes a complete cluster-fuck. It’s easy to see how someone could be confused and get the wrong idea.
I begged the staff to let me go outside just to have a single moment of tobacco bliss but was denied. I was given a nicotine patch and told to ‘sit tight’. I had very nearly died just the night before last and here I was begging for access to the second most likely cause of my untimely demise.
Nicotine isn’t hard to find and she can help you get through the worst of it as far as the anxiety is concerned. Being outside of the light of God when you are a devout and pious man in the legend of your own mind is probably the most anxiety-provoking feeling you could imagine.
There is nothing to stop Dale and Richard from doing burnouts through your circulatory system at breakneck speed until you return to the light. Nothing except the Xanax Dana offered generously from her own private stash.
The space I’m in isn’t hell, but it’s certainly not heaven. It’s purgatory. It’s a hospital, waiting to be discharged from one unpleasant reality to the next.
Read part 1 here:
Read part 2 here:
Mi Sun Chang is an Automotive Locksmith who also happens to write memoirs about her depraved past. It helps put her depraved present into perspective. She lives in Rhode Island with her ivory mystery snail (girlfriend) and two beloved cats.
