For fifteen years I’d been waiting for the news that this poor, skinny fucker had turned up dead in a place just like this, but here he was, (barely) living proof that it didn’t require much in the way of cooperation and commitment to simply keep on breathing.
It had probably been at least seven years since I’d last seen him, and he’d lost even more weight, pounds you wouldn’t think he could afford to lose. He seemed to have a permanent case of pneumonia.
He claimed he was installing countertops, this wrecked moron who was probably the most brilliant person I’d ever known. Once upon a time he had been, anyway.
For several weeks I’d harbored the nagging idea that I wanted to see him. At the moment, I felt surprisingly fine –pretty good, really, if not quite like the old days– but looking at him nodding off on the floor of that motel room I knew that I had nonetheless been mistaken. It would be just my luck if the fucker finally kicked in a room registered under my name.
He was sitting maybe three feet from the television, propped up against the foot of one of the beds, making a sort of instinctive, animal effort to watch Sports Center through fluttering eyes. Earlier I’d tried to rouse him to get him to clean his blood off the bathroom sink.
Twenty years he’d been playing with needles and he still made a mess. He was so fucked up he’d either missed the vein or popped it.
I wasn’t nearly as fearless as I’d once been, and was flat on the bed when the first wave rolled over me. I threw up in a plastic garbage pail.
“I’ll bet you never thought you’d feel that way again,” he said.
“This isn’t going to be my life,” I said. “It never was.”
“Of course,” he said. “You were always just an adventurer.” I knew this was him trying to be nasty, the best effort he had in him.
“Who buys this shit and pays for your motel rooms when I’m not around?” I asked.
“There’s always money,” he said. “Or there’s always people with money. I have a place, you know. The motel was your idea.”
I knew he had a place. I also knew I didn’t want to see it.
He had a weird and mysterious knack; no matter where he was –and he had been lots of places– he always seemed to know how to find drugs. Even in a dinky, jerkwater town like this he had his connections.
“Do you remember if there were Tecatos around back when you walked away?” he asked.
“No idea,” I said. “What are they?”
“Mexican junkies,” he said. “I work with a couple of them. They’re always plugged into something, although a lot of what they come up with is actually Fentanyl, and I’m not sure they know the difference.”
This was a guy who’d changed the direction of my life, and there were a lot of good, enduring things that I’d learned from him, along, of course, with the things that weren’t so good. There was a time when he’d had a real gift for discovering interesting things, in a place where that wasn’t so easy to do, and I’d once admired him more than anyone I knew.
I don’t know what happened to him, beyond the obvious things that had happened to him. I’d long since lost interest in trying to figure it out.
I think the last thing he said to me before he nodded off was, “Remember what you said to me that one time?”
“I don’t suppose I do,” I said.
I slept, which had been what I was really after, and when I woke up he was gone. I honestly can’t recall the last time I felt such a huge sense of relief.
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