Cocaine Kisses

     I'm probably the last person you want to be hearing from right now. A cadaver, a spector, the undead, a celestial body existing only to retell the tale of my vile demise. My name is Reese. I guess I'm a regular nineteen-year-old; I have my friends, family, I drink, smoke pot (and a various rabble of harmful substances), I have no idea where my life is going and so on. I graduated high school and I work a s****y part-time job at a s****y thrift store in a s****y city. It seems I'm doomed to wallow away in this cultural wasteland that we call a city, home to gangsters, thugs, punk kids, metalheads, and forty-year-old single moms with a family of six, while I, flushed with embarassment, step grudgingly to join the ranks. 
     I guess you could call me a metalhead. Slipknot raised me better than my cokehead mother ever could. She was a lovely woman still; natural black hair on porcelain skin with scolding blue eyes; she bore about her the kind of aggravated stare that one could only ascertain after after eight years in a s****y marriage and a harsh divorce from an even shittier marriage. I was the even shittier product of an attempt to bandage my parents' failing relationship. My dad hit the road before I was even born. A few days after I'd taken my first breath my mother had her first line of the white stuff, which proved more appealing than the prospect of motherhood. It seems she'd passed on the natural black hair. She also passed on the coke, born with a natural thirst for the million-dollar addiction. I was never held in it's grips as my mother once was--I was simply a social snorter. It flowed into my sinuses as naturally as oxygen.
     My friends were stoners, most of them. As was I. The friendly familiarity of pot smoke brought a happy buzz to us broken souls. The problem with us was that, well, we were always bid to be broken souls, always calling upon the hand of a fine lady named Mary Jane to put together the pieces. Unfourtunately there was no telling how long we would last before we would shatter again. Show me a stoner and I'll show you a person who's broken inside.
     How many times can we break before we shatter? How many highs can we climb, and climb and climb only to achieve the numbness we feel we deserve? We feel this only for a split second before we come crashing to the cement floors of sobriety. We will never find it, this permanant numbness, and every come-down and burn-out from the thrill of a high cracks us so hard that soon hairline fractures will start to appear in our bones. Like the addicts we are we climb once more and watch ourselves from the outside falling from grace, falling to an intoxicated demise. Some people see glory in being a lost cause--there's nothing glorious about what we are.

     With all this poetry and prose about drugs you'd think that I really care, but I really don't. I actually don't really care about anything. Sitting around and getting high is all I was ever taught to do, all I ever aspired towards. I squeezed through the education system with a cloud of THC in my eyes-- all four years of high school are an intoxicated blur. One thing that had always set me apart from the rest of my friends was both my blessing and my curse. I was numb, completely and utterly detatched from those and everything around me. Emptiness dwelled within me moreso than anything else, like a downward spiralling staircase, and I was just a toddler tumbling to the bottom. I hoped and prayed only to find the bottom. Drugs brought me there, brought me to the bottom of myself, where I lay in the sickening nothingness. Show me a stoner and I'll show you a person who's broken inside.

     My hoping and praying brought me to her. She was a stoner too, deeply scarred and broken to pieces. She had dark hair and blue eyes and did coke, just like my mother. She smiled in a nonchalantly sickening manner when I told her I wanted her. I told her my name. I told her my problems. I asked her if she was fucked like I was. She was down.
     "Roxy," she said her name was. "and you?"

     "Reese," I replied. "but everybody calls me Reese's Pieces."

     She smiled, the same sickening, stoned grin. "Maybe I'll just have to call you Snickers." She feigned a snicker at my expense. Our little teasing banter made me want her even more, but I suppressed my lip-biting. Her hands rested on her studded belt, drawing attention to the ruby redness of her shirt, all the while looking me up and down like an exciteable raven.

     "So, what's a pretty girl like you doing in a place like this?" I leaned back on my smoothness of my words. Routinely, we all sat around in my buddy Dylan's garage, smoking weed and whatever else we had. Roxy was a pretty little addition to our tribe of lowlifes.
     She was taken aback by my subtle flirtations. "Do you want the real answer, or the bullshit answer?" she asked. "Because my bullshit answer would have to be that Dylan invited me to come try out his new bong."

     "And what's the real answer?"
     "Hmm, well, abusive ex-boyfriend, dead parents, s****y foster parents, and Hep-C." Roxy answered, without a shred of upsettedness or grim emotion. She simply said it like she was reading it. "Bad tattooing needle. Hep-C is a curable strain, though. I'll be fine, I'll be f*****g within the week." she looked up at me through thickly darkened eyelashes.

     I swallowed thickly, being penetrated by the icy blue of her eyes. "Tattoo, you say?"
     "Mmm." she agreed through pressed lips. "I have six. This is the culprit." She lifted up the Ruby Roxy shirt and exposed her tattoo, gothic cursive writing running from hip to sculpted hip, hell hath no fury. I noticed another tattoo of blue scissors on her elbow, cutting industriously into the ink tendons of her arms. She pulled her shirt back down and took in my expression. I was expressionless, though awe-struck in her gothic angelicness. She loved it.

     "Hell hath no fury, like a woman's scorn?" I asked.
     "Right on." she clarified, smiling still.

     "Are you scornful, Roxy?"

     "Maybe a little." she replied in a husky tone. "I'm more dangerous than scornful."

     This time I couldn't suppress my lip-biting.

     She resonated a love of the tease, though she remained emotionless, aside from a stoned smile perched upon her pink lips. "So, what are you in for, Snickers?" she asked, still smiling up at me through thick black eyelashes.

     "Do you want the real reason, or the bullshit reason?"
     "I think I can handle the real reason."
     "Cokehead mom, deadbeat dad, multiple personalities..." I grinned for the first time during the conversation, reminiscing of my morbid desecrations. "a touch of schizophrenia, depression, the list goes on really."

     "Sounds to be a valid reason." was all she said in reply. The bong cut her off, swooping in front of her elegant lips, infusing THC in her lipgloss. She pulled back from the red-glass contraption and exhaled snowy white smoke. "Interested?" she asked, holding the bong out to me in offering but I refused.
     "I think maybe you'd get me high enough, Roxy." I said, almost in a whisper.
     She looked pleased and passed the bong over to Dylan, who was already bathing his face in his blueberry blunt. "I guess," she began. "you really are interested?"

     "I am," I admitted. "how about you, Roxy?"

     "I am." she admitted. "I don't live too far from here."

      I was too high to tell and this is where my memory lapses, but there must have been at least twenty minutes between leaving Dylan's garage and seeing Roxy naked.

     All of her tattoos were exposed, playing upon her porcelain skin. Her black lace panties tantalized my imagination, every inch of her body was apart of the tease, utilizing every inch of her woman's scorn. She had a nice set of tits on her, the pretty outlines of feminine abdominals adorned her stomach while her raven hair swooped gracefully to her collarbone. Her skin was beautiful from head to toe; as if it had never seen the sunlight, it was like milk. It wasn't long until I was lapping her up.

     I got her Hep-C, her pretty little liver dysfunction playing through her porcelain skin. She apologized but I really didn't care, and neither did she. After all, we didn't really care about anything. Unfourtunately her cocaine kisses were too much for me to resist. She slid into her black lace panties and lit a cigarette while I laid, revelling in the majesty and the sickening nothingness. Unfourtunately she had to say goodbye for now.

     This is where my memory lapses. Somewhere between the bedroom and now was an hour of magic; we both had a half-quarter of shrooms, both had a half-quarter of pot and split a 24 pack of Canadian. We simply did not exist in this world. We would momentarily slip back to reality, coming to the realization that there was still a world outside of her off-white apartment; we then promptly slipped back into our own little world, where the checkered tile of her kitchen floor was zooming around me like a Nascar race track.

     Really what I'm trying to say is that I'm not sure how Roxy died. Maybe it was because she killed me first. Or maybe I was too high to tell and my memory lapses. All I know is that she was smiling the whole time because she was empty inside, and was doing us both a favour. She was always smiling that same smile, sickened and stoned. Fourtunately I was down with her sickness. Fourtunately she was so, so sick.