Chapter 7. Tar

The house was empty except for the dogs, Sushi and Tofu. Nick had moved everything from his office except for his desk and an empty file-cabinet. Adrienne knew that its drawers never had anything in them but his chrome fort-four and with him gone that left her with three unoccupied bedrooms. She liked it well enough that way, but it did get lonely. Now that Max was sober, she preferred to be around her using and drinking friends. These contacts broke the monotony. Her friend, Jane, always brought over a taste of this or that, and, depending on what she was high on, she could be entertaining. Adrienne called her “my angry dyke”. Max's name for Jane was The Stir because she was always stirring things up with vindictive gossip. As mentioned previously she and Jane had a thing back when they were in Casa Pacifica, but that ended when Adrienne hooked up with Nick. Jane got unbearably nasty for a while, but they could still get together for a drink or a few tokes of pot… all was forgiven once she got high… to a point.

She twisted around before the mirror in the bathroom to inspect a black spot on her hip where she’d muscle-popped a few times with Billy. The spot had been growing larger and it hurt like hell at the slightest touch. As she was doing that she heard a honk from the street. She hated it when people did that and knew it had to be Jane. She went to the balcony overlooking the front yard and the street in time to see Jane scaling the fence.

“Stop, Jane, I’ll open the gate!”

Jane caught her tennis shorts and ripped them open on one of the fence pole's spikes.  She yelled, “That’s okay, I’m almost over it now.” Her ankle hit sideways as she jumped to the ground and tumbled onto the lawn. Writhing on the walkway on her back and brushing her legs off, she cursed, "Motherfucker! I'm okay... okay?"

Adrienne couldn’t restrain herself from laughing.

Jane was half-laughing and half-crying for the pain, “That’s fine, bitch, go ahead and laugh…”

Adrienne was down the stairs and out the door before Jane could get up.

Laughing, Jane yelled at the top of her lungs, “Hey, do I look fucked up or what?”

She helped Jane up, gave her a shoulder, and checked, looking over her shoulders, to see if the neighbors could hear them, as they comically hobbled up the steps to the door. Jane plopped down on the couch in the music room where she promptly put her foot on a milking stool.

Adrienne got her a drink and they sat there looking out at the vista all the way to the Channel Islands. Jane’s slurred and leering voice broke the silences at last, “So, where is Nick now?”

“Nick… I don’t know, hanging out in Buellton… I don’t care.”

“I saw Rod the other day down at Pasqual’s.” Jane leered.

“Yeh, so what? I don’t care about that fucker…”

“How about Max?”

“Max, oh, we’re just friends now.”

“Does that mean I have you all to myself?”

“No Jane, that won’t happen again.” She didn’t want to hurt Jane's feelings any more than her rejection already had, so she added, “At least not now.” But she meant, not until hell freezes over.

“Good then, let me have another drink and I’ll get my ass out of here.”

Adrienne took Jane’s glass to the kitchen and poured another dab of orange juice into a glass, emptying the last drop from the pint of vodka.

“No ice!” Jane called out.

“Okay, okay, no ice, madam.” Adrienne knew better than to take up room in the glass for anything but vodka. “You’d better like it because that is all I have.”

“Are you still just buying pints?”

“What is it to you how I buy it?”

“I’m just saying… say, don’t worry, I have a jug in the car.” She held up her glass as though toasting, “Here’s to us.”

All the implications… Adrienne was getting tired of the implied longing… the need to capture her, her soul. There’s always someone needing to control or have her… Nick… Jane… Rémy… and, at one time… Max. She went-off on poor Jane, “What do you mean, ‘us’?”

“Us… I don’t mean anything by it.”

“Then why do you say that… there is no ‘us’. There is you… you are sitting there… and there is me. I am sitting here, and we are having a drink."

Jane winced, “Got it, okay?”

“No, you don’t get it, Jane. You still want it to be ‘us’ and I just want a friend I can trust.” She got up off the couch and clinked the empty pint against Jane’s glass.

“God damn, I’m not trying to get in your pants, Adrienne.”

“Yes you are! And I sometimes wish I didn’t have a fu-foo-net for you and the boys to play with.”

“Oh yeh,” Jane puzzled, “Is your fu-foo-net what I think it is?”

“Probably,” she grinned proudly, “My mother called it that… my silly boy trap.”

“Yeah, I can see it: A Brazil-waxed Barbie Doll,” saying that, she got up and hobbled into the room with the fireplace.

Before Adrienne could respond, Jane tossed her glass into the fireplace where it shattered and she shouted, “L’Chaim!”

“Fuck you Jane, you’re not a Jew damn it!” Adrienne countered… thinking of her mother’s escape from Holland, “Maybe I’m the one that's a Jew!”

They stood glaring at each other for a minute before Jane made for the door, “Fuck you Frenchy. What is your nose? Basque? French? A Jew? I know what I am…a Greek Dyke, and I said, ‘Like I am!’”

Adrienne waited to hear the car start and went back up to the studio where she sat on a high stool. She should call Billy for some tar. Tar, shit…. she remembered when she first shot heroin. It had almost romantic, mysterious names, like “Horse” and “China White” or just plain “H” back then. Now, what everyone gets is something brown and ugly, nothing pretty, like a stew from dragon’s droppings. It sits in Afghanistan, or, maybe a jungle somewhere in South America, fermenting in twenty-gallon barrels… it is steeped in the greed of tribal warlords, cartels, and syndicates. “It sits, sucking the blood and sweat from peasants, before it comes to fester and create abscesses in the body and soul of junkies like Nick, Billy and fucking me.”

Adrienne never liked psychedelics… they made her too… they took her places where…

“Oh, I don’t really want to think about it…” she once told Max, “where they take me… to dark places… never where everything is beautiful. My visions are horrors. Heroin shuts them off and I become a rock.”

She called Billy on his pager. Pagers were already old-school back then but Billy didn’t trust cell phones or landlines. Before he called back, Adrienne’s mind was made up. She wasn’t all that sure whether her mind had anything to do with it but just the thought of fixing awoke the hunger. Those vodka hangovers were getting worse and she needed something that could get her through the day. Letting go of resistance is a relief of sorts… Billy could fix that…

The hunger grows. That is what it does. It has a mind of its own and she gave it her dreams… her hopes faded to black… black tar consumed what was left of them. Her face in the mirror looked back at her. She was a junkie… a tar baby. Adrienne knew of so many times she’d gotten clean, life began to look good again… the light in her eyes brightened, the scabs and scars on her hips ankles, hands, and arms, started to fade… but somehow that wasn’t ever good enough. There was this appetite that couldn’t be quenched. She often heard people say that all that was needed would be a good job, some meaning and purpose to a junkie’s life… a Hollywood love-life… a spiritual awakening… It didn’t matter to her… even God can’t do enough for anyone to relieve this craving. What is that? Where does a junkie go from where she dwells? She’d tried it all. One rehab after another... one spiritual path after another… anything to take away the craving…. What could she do but surrender to it?

She told herself, “I will just do muscle-pops from now on. I’m not putting tar into my veins. It isn’t as quick, but it does the job and I don’t have to fumble around, probing for a vein that isn’t collapsed. I just put that spike in my butt and act as though everything is just fine. No tracks to hide; no long-sleeved shirts; no rush either but that’s okay. No one can tell I am a junkie unless they get my pants off. Who is going to get that far with me unless they know already what I am about?”

Billy made his delivery. They talked about old times and eventually they went to bed. After she got what she wanted she was done, she pushed him off… off and away, “You have to go now, Billy.”

“But, Adrienne, why?”

“Because, I have other things to do,” she was transfixed on the tin foil that opened up showing the gooey tar. That alone was on her mind. She just wanted to have sex after they’d hit-up and Billy was compliant. He left the house disappointed because she wouldn’t let him stay. It is always that way with sex. She wanted the fuckers to go away no matter how close they’d been.  After all, she paid for the shit with cash and not her body. Sure, she had sex with him, and that was for herself, but after that she wanted nothing more but to get with it on her own.

She hit up again; heroin came on to her at the cellular level. It didn’t talk to her brain… it talked to her body… relaxed the muscles… it hummed through the blood stream… a gentle orgasm… Unlike a so-called mind-expanding chemical it narrows the focus... narrows it into a tunnel where the train at the end of it doesn’t matter, saying, “Here I am, dear one… you have been waiting so long for this… I am here.”

And her body answers …. “Aaaah.”