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  “The Thirteenth Tradition,” a voice suddenly boomed from behind me. “Put your hands behind your back.”

  “He made me do it!” Sy whimpered.

  I saw the cop in the mirror above the counter, the one customers checked to see if anything sketchy was going on behind them when they got their pills. He answered the pharmacist when his eyes met mine. “I’m not talking to you, Mr. Sydowsky, I’m talking to your customer.”

  He was a shambling man in a brown suit, with a solid roll of fat over his belt. He held up his badge in one hand and a gun in the other. “Nice and easy,” he said.

  I complied without a struggle. But I was still curious. “Is there a thirteenth tradition?”

  “Sure,” said the policeman, pocketing his baggage but leaving his gun-hand extended. “It starts with you have the right to remain silent. You want to hold hands and say it together, sunshine?”

  The Shambler walked me to an unmarked Crown Vic, opened the back door, barked the obligatory “Watch your head” familiar from big screen and little, and shoved me in. That was not the last thing he did. The instant my backside hit the ripped upholstery, the officer leaned in, shoved me roughly sideways—my hand landed in something wet—and reached down to unlock the cuffs. Before I could ask why, he slammed the door and disappeared. I sat still for a second. The car smelled like Lysol and Armani for Men. (Pastor Bobb’s scent of choice.) I realized there was someone else in the car. Behind the wheel. A sleek, bullet-headed African-American fellow, his right cheekbone sporting a crescent scar. (He resembled Paul Robinette, the handsome, high-cheekboned black assistant DA in the early days of Law & Order. Then I saw his name tag and the coin dropped. This was Detective Dustin. This was Jay’s Dusty. The mythical Dusty, in the flesh, with a wedding ring and a stare that burrowed into the back of your head. “You still here?” he said.

  “What? Am I supposed to—”

  “Shut up, Lloyd. You know how this works. Tell us who set up the caper, we’ll let you go right now.”

  He actually said the word “caper.”

  “Nobody set it up,” I said. “I walked into the pharmacy and got a stupid idea on my own.”

  “You sure about that? I know all about you and your pal Pastor Bobb. None of your buddies, back at Christian Swinglers or whatever, had anything to do with this?”

  “It’s Swingles. And I don’t have any buddies there.”

  For the first time, Detective Dustin’s gaze softened. (It was like watching an L & O rerun, except I was in it.) He gave the faintest of nods and spoke without moving his lips, like a ventriloquist. “You passed. Door’s unlocked. Get out. Go to Greyhound, Will Call. There’s a ticket waiting. Don’t make any stops and nobody’s gonna stop you.”

  As I stepped out, I was pretty sure I saw a shimmer, the noon sun bouncing off binoculars in a building directly across from the pharmacy. I could feel the blessing of Pastor Bobb upon me. Or maybe it was the five Percocet I dry-gulped before getting in the car. (Artificial sense of well-being, occasional hypermania.) Sometimes the side effects are the only ones you want.

  SIX

  Riding the Dog

  When’s the last time you traveled by long-distance bus? Or sat in a Greyhound station? It’s not just the home of homeless and runaways anymore. Now it’s a family place. The way homeless shelters have become family fun zones. Without the fun.

  I had two hours before my bus. There were years when I was two hours late for everything, in the worst days of the worst days. But now I’m the early guy. Which is either vaguely pathetic or commendably responsible, depending. (The more out of control you feel, the more normal you try to act.) I had a yen for Necco Wafers. I don’t know why. Retro candies were fashionable. Or maybe, in Greyhound-world, they weren’t retro. Either way, I didn’t feel like feeding the pay TVs bolted to the chairs in the waiting room. So I just walked around. And saw a row of Necco Wafers at the snack stand, a row of them right beside some Beemans gum and a stack of Chunkys. I got a Chunky as well, because, even though I’d been on a rigorous protocol for my liver and parasites for some time, I did not foresee being able to stay on it now. I’d managed, through my brief stint at Christian Swingles, to keep up with the juicing, and to administer my coffee enemas. (More room for heroin!) But now, with a three-day ride on Greyhound, I didn’t foresee any quality enema time—not to mention the prospect of pouring bus-stop java into a hot water bottle and tubing it into my lower intestine in a back-of-the-bus toilet did not strike me as either wise or de-toxy. If I attempted it and the door swung open, I could probably be arrested by Homeland Security for lewd and malicious interstate anal probing. (I didn’t actually drink coffee anymore, but I won’t lie, the caffeine buzz after bottom-hosing a hot water bottle full of fair-trade joe is not to be sneezed at. It left me flying. The other advantage—you couldn’t dunk with a coffee enema. On other occasions, when I’d relapsed on latte, I’d find myself unable to resist purchasing a Dunkin’ Donuts Toasted Coconut Vanilla Kreme or some Sugar Glazed Strawberry Munchkins and soaking them in my liquid liver killer as I consumed them. Why coffee should destroy your liver orally and save it anally remains one of the great mysteries of New Age medicine.) So, when I saw the candies, and realized I’d had some kind of yen I didn’t even realize—I don’t even like Necco Wafers, they’re hell on my chalky molars—I took it as some kind of omen. I was actually going to get clean. I’d decided. Now was the time. No ifs, ands, or balloons.

  Somehow, gathering my candies and my copy of Weekly World News—I believed the WWN, home of “Bat Boy,” reflected America’s primal fear and id in ways new media couldn’t hope to, but it’s not a point of view I’d want to defend—hope bit me like a werewolf and kept running, so that I felt simultaneously uplifted and infected.

  Speaking of the infected, Curt Siodmak, who wrote the original Wolf Man, viewed the werewolf as a metaphor for the Jew in Hitler’s Europe. Siodmak escaped Germany and landed in Hollywood. Through no fault of the werewolf’s own, he’d been attacked by a monster, who in turn transformed him into a monster, a good man become hunted and shunned. Why do I know this? Because Wolf Man was the first Side-Effects movie. First the attack—then the symptoms. We see them at the same time the victim sees them. Once lycanthropic serum is in the blood, the effects—as so often happens, pharmaceutical commercial buffs will tell you—reveal themselves slowly, and then all at once. Bitten by a werewolf? You may experience mild euphoria, feelings of newfound power, sudden appearance of full-body pelt and canine incisors during a full moon. Some patients report disturbing “incidents,” followed by memory loss and occasional incarceration. See your doctor if you experience rapid “bulking up,” four-legged gait, urge to urinate outdoors or kill and eat people.

  I love that movie.

  SEVEN

  Daddy Ink

  The woman—not a girl, just girlish—was tiny enough to curl up in the bus seat with her legs under her, and from what I could see, where her army jacket had crumpled down and exposed her back, owned a neck and shoulders of such sinewy delicacy that the size of her breasts came as a shock. Perhaps to equalize the impact, between her shoulder blades, in loving detail, was a tattoo of a German shepherd’s head, teeth bared, like it was about to lunge, with DADDY inked underneath in Gothic letters.

  Maybe the Daddy dog drove people away. You’d think stripper, or ballet dancer, or both. Trouble in any flavor. By the time I found out the story behind Daddy and the big-fanged dog, my heart cracked in a different place than it would have had I found out earlier. The only empty seat, besides this one, was next to the chemical toilet in back. Aside from the prospect of breathing disinfectant and people’s private sadness for twelve hours, I knew, from experience, that the toilet door would probably de-latch at some point and start banging back and forth off the seat behind it. Off the knees of whatever large liver happened to be occupying it. I liked my chances better with Daddy’s girl.

  The
re had to be some reason nobody else would sit next to her. I had a feeling I was going to find out why. Is there a tribe of fuckups that seek each other out? That recognize the scent of exhilarating desperation that comes from etc . . . etc . . .

  When you’ve written corpo-speak you sometimes lapse into it. Find that it’s crept into your brainpan and shaped the patterns and presentation of all your precious thoughts. Or else whole-cloth replaced them. This is an area worthy of intense and unflinching self-analysis. I was just too tired to pursue it. I’d muddle on, as I did through most of life, guided by a vague sense—my personal code—that if I could stay a little farther from the things I dreaded and closer to the things I didn’t hate, life might possibly, you never know, almost (these things happen) be okay.

  Happiness. Possible side effects may include disappointment, recurring feelings of despair leading to possible long-term hopelessness. Some people report diarrhea and “copper penny” breath while using this product. Call your physician if condition persists.

  I saw the stack of greeting cards fanning out of her backpack before I sat down. It seemed odd. But I wouldn’t have reached in and snatched them had she so much as nodded at me.

  Acknowledgment, however meager, sometimes matters. We’re only human. But she offered none. The girl with the shepherd ink kept herself wedged against the window, face pressed into dark glass—it was a night ride—ignoring me completely.

  Book Two

  Women have a feeling that since they didn’t make the rules, the rules have nothing to do with them.

  DIANE JOHNSON

  EIGHT

  You’re So Pretty When You Breathe Through Your Mouth

  I did not know romance was in the air when I stepped aboard. But the more I looked at her, mouth-breathing, under a dark blue babushka pulled tight over thick black hair that plainly didn’t want to stay in there, the more . . . I don’t know how to put it, the more her face became beautiful underneath the wrapping. (Even though, feet to the fire, I couldn’t say that I’d really seen it.) Became everything I wanted before I even knew I wanted it. Choose your cliché.

  I couldn’t even tell you why, maybe it was FMD—Film Noir Disease— but I pegged her for a woman on the lam. I didn’t even know if people still said “on the lam.” But she had that about her, whatever you call it. Running away. On a trip that wasn’t planned. Maybe not entirely unexpected—but not planned.

  There was something remarkable about her, but I couldn’t place it at first. Then I realized—she was sucking her thumb. It was almost shocking. I thought of Carroll Baker in Baby Doll. Sleeping in a crib. Wrongly alluring in infantile sex-wear. Sweaty Eli Wallach having his way with her. Or did I dream the sex-wear and crib stuff? As if she saw me staring, she tugged her thumb out from between her teeth. This was when I realized she hadn’t been sleeping, she’d been reading. Face pressed into the bus window, over a paperback I couldn’t make out. The cover was dark. Then I saw that it wasn’t a book-book. It was a bound notebook. Not one of those moleskins, which everybody bought because they thought it turned them into Hemingway. But a generic brand. Its cover some kind of shiny fake. But big enough for her hand to disappear inside. So she could write without her seatmate knowing either what she was writing or that she was writing at all. My future friend did not acknowledge me, so I (quietly) rifled her bag. I wondered if she was “journaling.” But she didn’t look like somebody who’d use that word. Unless she was mocking it.

  The first card had a picture of a respectable suburban lady nailed to a crucifix on the front. Inside was GET OFF THE CROSS, WE NEED THE WOOD. Happy Mother’s Day! It was unsigned.

  There were more like that. Theme cards. All unsigned. A bulldog on the end of a chain, snarling up at a mailman, said BOUNDARIES. Try some, just as an experiment . . . Another showed a meadow of wildflowers, in bloom, tinted blue. A barbed-wire fence cuts through the middle of the flowers. You call it a restraining order. I call it tough love. The last, another showstopper, had nothing on the cover but Marge Simpson, arms outspread. You can’t get rid of the button-pushers, but you can get rid of the buttons!

  It must have been my chortling—though I’m not usually a chortler—that made her whip around. We were the only two, in the highway darkness of the bus, who had our overhead on. “The fuck you doing?” she said. I saw her entire face full-on for the first time and thought the word “vulpine,” though I have never used it before or since. Little black-bagged fox eyes burned out through her black bangs like those of a wary prisoner peeking through the bars of a cell.

  “Are these all blank?” I asked her.

  She snatched the cards out of my hand without answering.

  I didn’t react. “No judgment, I’m just saying. You must know a lot of people with issues.”

  She blew the bangs out of her eyes and kicked her legs off the seat and onto the floor with what was either energy or violence. (I guessed you’d have to get to know her to find out which was which.) The soles of her boots made a sticky sound when she picked them up again after five seconds and folded herself back onto her seat. A smell came off her like carnival mustard, perspired-in leather, and dill. The scent was dark, possibly tainted. And did something to my heart the minute I breathed it, made me have to gasp for two breaths in a row, gave me a jolt in my testes that felt like love.

  I hovered, like some kind of zoner perv. When she finally looked up, her cracked-glass green eyes and giant pupils showed themselves then disappeared again, back to her notebook. Our eyes held long enough for me to study the bags beneath hers. Dark blue Samsonites, from debauchery or pain or just staying up late, like some Paris existentialist sandwiching Sartre and Camus in the forties. Of course, I was done. That was it. Those bags were like matching brands that made love and pity impossible to separate. I was not usually a hallucinator. But for one bright flash, headlights flooded the window and I made out words under each of her eyes. FUCKED UP under one, COME ON IN under the other. (A counselor once told me I was addicted to women who needed help. He sent me to SLAA. Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous. Where addicts relapsed with other addicts in meetings. (A cringe across a crowded room . . .) Where there were women who needed help in ways I had never conceived of. I’d wandered in to experience the miracle of recovery, the terrible joy of “slipping,” and the liberation that comes right after both. Until you surrender, if you’re lucky, and you remember who’s holding the wheel. Let go, let God.)

  Go Greyhound and leave the driving to us!

  A jingle, for some reason, that reminded me of my all-time favorite pharma-slogan: At Parker-Stephenson, we make drugs for people who need them.

  I had an empathic moment, as I settled in beside her, where I felt my bus-mate’s internal struggle. Could sense her assessing. He’s an asshole, but he’s kind of an interesting asshole. Outside, we passed a neon Sleepy Bear in a nightcap, sleepwalking with his arms stretched out before him. The legendary Travelodge logo. MOTEL—18 MILES.

  “I don’t send these,” she continued, possibly deciding it was less awkward speaking to me than ignoring me the entire ride.

  “You don’t send them. I get it. Because it is my fucking business, why do you have them?”

  “Because I wrote them.”

  “You wrote them?”

  Instant hostility. I was smitten. Another word I’d never used before. Wouldn’t go near. Actually kind of hate. Things were changing!

  “Why? You don’t think I can write?”

  Something in my heart smoldered, though it may have been my left ventricle, set twitching by heroin depletion. Or an endocarditis flare-up, fallout from a long-ago case of cotton fever, when a fiber from the dirty Q-tip fluff I was sucking coke-and-dope through ended up in my heart. (My temperature spiked to 105. Nothing a bathtub full of ice cubes couldn’t turn right around.) I’ve always had a dream of finding another soul I could share my life with. Another artist. But greeting cards! Maybe there was
a benign force that ruled the universe.

  Or not.

  I asked her how she even got the idea and her tone shifted completely. She spoke almost shyly—“you really want to know?”—in an accent I couldn’t place. Maybe southern. Maybe Pittsburgh. I said I did, I wanted to know, and she gathered her black-jeaned legs back under the seam-ripped seat and started. Her voice was deep and throaty. Either from whiskey and cigarettes, in which case it was permanent, or maybe it was temporary, from heroin. An opiated croak.

  Smack shrinks your pupils the size of pinpricks. Super black. It’s like there’s an ant hole in each eyeball, right under the tombstone, but you never see any ants. They’re invisible. Sometimes it feels like they’re crawling into your eyes. On cocaine they crawl back out and burrow under your skin. Coke bugs! But when you’re dope-sick, or even just a little needy, your eyes go the opposite way. They pie-plate, widen right up to old-school acid size. Except it’s not from taking acid. It’s from not taking heroin—or whatever opiate du jour you were talking about. Or weren’t talking about, in my new friend’s case. Because, from the beginning, what she was talking about and what I thought she was talking about seemed to be circling each other. But that voice!

  “Like, somebody will ask me how I’m doing, okay, and every time I try to tell them, to really tell them, instead of laying out some happy horseshit, they say the same thing: Hang in there! Do you know how much I hate that? How fucking patronizing that is? But it’s like I don’t hate them, I hate myself, for letting myself think I could trust them. You know what I mean? Sometimes people even send that card, the one that actually says Hang in there! You know, with the picture of the cute kitten hanging on to a branch? It makes me want to puke.”