I Hardly Remember Their Names
TW | SA
Mike lived on the route from where I sold the stolen CDs, between there and the park where I got my smack. He also had a room I could come back to and do my smack in, on the first floor above an old dining room of an old hotel that was now an informal tavern.
Weaving through the drunken up to his place, Mike knew the rhythms of the flows of the out of it. It was a big room, wooden floors, a single chair and a depressed sponge, some greyed sheets. And Mike sat on that single chair commanding the empty room while he forced me always to give more than I could afford to.
Mike lived on the route to where I bought my heroin and he stood on the balcony studying the rhythms and the flows of the unaware.
Mike exists always in silhouette, there is a light behind him, or he is in the shadows, or he has a hat or a hoody, or there are people around him, or I am simply not paying attention. Here, now, it is impossible to reconstruct Mike from memory. It is less possible to reconstruct what Mike did.
He is always with someone, his people, there are one or two or three maybe. Sometimes he is alone. The more there are, the more I have to give. There are days where it is a choice between losing smack to the wind or to Mike and his people.
Wooden floors accumulate a particular waxy grime, while waiting for the pipe I would peel that grime off with my fingernails. After I had smoked crack I would peel that grime off for hours. There would always be more crack than heroin because in that room there were always more people who wanted my heroin. This happened everywhere, every nyamandawo, every hokkie and zozo and underneath every black plastic, shelter came with tax. And there were always other places outside of the wind, there were other routes to the park.
The plane trees lined the avenues, and the shade was expansive; when waking on the street in the morning, rather, when finding a place to sleep at night, seeking out the place where the sun would find you in the morning became a reflex; people were stabbed over future patches of light.
Walking toward the dealer and trying to avoid a someone, you could line yourself behind one tree after another, use trees as shields to stay out of sight. There were few trees on the road past Mike’s hotel and so I started to use other ways to the park. Mike’s always someones flowed in their own rhythms up and down these streets, and these trees and them were in a perpetual dance, always me trying to avoid the suggestion to come and smoke upstairs at Mike’s.
And there were days when I simply did not care, and went upstairs to Mike’s or walked past Mike’s on the way there, because it was faster, hoping he wouldn’t see me but resigned to it either way.
There was a day when I walked past his balcony and he shouted out to me and I ignored him and he sent someone down to ask why I was ignoring him and I was hustled back after buying the drugs and Mike extracted extra tax for ignoring him.
There were times when his people would find me walking away after buying my supplies and try to convince me to come smoke at Mike’s and as much as I would hold in my mind a refusal, and state it and state it, no, I have to go here, or there, or I am late for this, or that, I would end up at Mike’s. If I was seen, I would end up at Mike’s. If it became known to Mike that I had been there without coming to smoke at Mike’s there would be extra tax the next time.
I did not always buy there, in that park, or smoke in that district, and partially because of Mike I started spending more time buying a few blocks away. But the smack was cheaper and better in that park, and I tried to remain aware.
Walking back down to the park, with Dain, I tell Dain I need to avoid Mike’s. Dain tells me that he will make sure nothing happens. On the way back up after giving Dain his drugs, walking up to Dain’s hole in the wall, Mike shouts at me from the balcony and then shouts at Dain, and Dain runs. I am captured a block away in the opposite direction.
Upstairs at Mike’s I am slapped around a little bit and all my drugs are taken away from me. Mike will give me small hits if I beg him. I spend my afternoon begging. After the drugs finish I continue to beg, other people come in with other drugs and I continue to beg and get. It does not take me long to realise that I can get free drugs if I just go upstairs to Mike and beg him. There are always other people being taxed.
Casually walking down the road, as casually as possible, a stolen cell phone in my pocket, I am suddenly surrounded by three men, I am not yet in sight of Mike’s balcony. They want the phone. They drag me to the floor, I curl to protect the phone and they begin to stab me, in my back, in my ass. I curl tighter, I need this phone to get my drugs. They are pulled off me, or give up, I am suddenly lying alone in the street bleeding, and people are trying to call an ambulance, I walk and crawl to the dealers and sell the phone and sit on the street, in the doorway of a broken shop, and I smoke until the ambulance comes. I spend a week in hospital, I have been stabbed an unfathomable amount of times.
I am found in a ditch somewhere. Broken bones, my stitches ripped out from a fall. I am taken to hospital in a shopping trolley, and am there for a few weeks to stabilise. A nurse thinks I have been thrown from a car.
I am in a holding cell for possession, and a man threatens to rape me. Holds me down and pretends to pull down his pants, I can feel the movement, I think it is happening and I think, in this moment of Mike.
There are other small indignities where I think of Mike.
After I leave the street I begin to dream of Mike. I wake up crying. In my dreams the stabbing, the car accident, the almost prison rape, all become one thing. I wake up crying one day and when my partner asks me what I was dreaming about, and I say nothing, she says you kept asking Mike to stop. And I tell her that Mike and his friends captured me for four days and raped me and stabbed me and threw me out of a moving vehicle.
Mike never raped me. This never happened. There are mornings when I bolt out of sleep because Mike is on top of me and I desperately search for a patch of sunlight.