New York

I wrote this for a contest...

            The road of life stretched out before Wesley Hafner at age thirteen and the first time his pudgy hand grasped a needle, he decided not to follow it. The road wavered and blinked out of existence. Heroin was Wes’s new path. He first felt the enticing hands of curiosity gripping his mind when he saw his brother, Josh, with some friends behind a shed. As he had come around the corner, he had seen the needles, he had seen the drugs, and he had seen the ecstasy on the friends’ faces. He had been ten. That curiosity had stayed with him, infecting his mind, impeding his school work, desecrating him like a plague. Now, Wes is seventeen and alone. Seventeen and struggling to survive in the slums of New York City. At eighteen, he will contract the HIV virus from a dirty needle and at nineteen, he will be dead. His eyes no longer shine with that curiosity from years before. Those eyes are dull, and behind them, if you look hard enough, you can see knowledge. If you look even harder you can see what looks like pain and beyond that, only indifference.

            The evening, was hot, but not humid, and so Wes did not mind being outside. He had just come home from working at his grandfather’s bakery across the street, and it was great to be out from behind the stuffy counter. He brushed his hands off on his blue jeans, the flour making a miniature cloud and settling. The front door yawned open, alleviating the inner sanctum of his mother. He hardly saw her those days and it weighed on his mind like a wet woolen blanket. She was not in the best of conditions and he noticed it with each passing day as, more often, her head obscured in cigarette smoke, she would tell him to do his homework. His mother’s voice grated on the ears, and her phlegm filled cough made Wes positively cringe. Years later, when that very cough issued from his mouth, his horror was immeasurable. 

The shed behind his house was a relic from the Great Depression. Its walls were barely held up by a few rusty nails, the boards were warped out of alignment, and the rain penetrated the shed with ease. At age seven, Wes had been afraid of that shed, but now, it was a place to go, a place where the big kids went to act like adults. He heard the distant sound of voices and muffled chatter and as he turned the corner, he saw his brother. Josh, at the time, sixteen years old, leaned against the decrepit shed, a belt tied tightly around his forearm. His vein, which was usually just visible, bulged out of the hinge of his elbow under the pressure of the belt, which he held between his teeth. His other hand held a needle, quivering slightly, over the vein and with one deft motion, inserted it, pushing down on the plunger. Wes’s eyes widened and at that moment the two friends, a boy and a girl, looked at him. They did not move as if to hurt Wes or apprehend him, in fact, they did not seem to care that he was watching their secret act. It was a look that Wes, seven years later, would know like the lines of his palm. It was the look of an imminent junkie. “Hey,” said the girl “Hey, Josh, your brother’s here.” Josh turned a look of surprise briefly touching his features and his mouth contorted in a grin, eyebrows raised, steel blue eyes alight.

            “Hey Wes…come here,” said his older brother, and Wes Hafner, ten years and three months old, met his fate with arms wide open.

If you will permit me to fast forward seven years, we see Wes three months before high school graduation. He had scraped by to this point and will scrape out of high school without a diploma and with more debts than friends. It was a Tuesday and Wes’s first class of the day, physics, was grating on his nerves. “S**t,” he exclaimed too loudly, causing the teacher to give him a harsh look over her notes.

“Language,” she replied sternly, her eyes returning to the complicated equation she was checking. He had always loathed her. The way she flipped her slightly graying hair out of her eyes, the way she sniffed back the snot in her nose, the way she wore very unbecoming clothes. His physics teacher was like the girl that everyone hated, you know the type. He had thrown down his text book and stood up.

“I’m leaving,” he barked, making several of the more timid of classmates jerk their faces up to look at him. Deer in headlights.

“Sit down right now,” said his teacher, and she with that she stood up. “I’m warning you Wesley, sit down or I’m calling the administration.” This had made Wes smile.

“You can call those fuckers, but I’ll be gone by the time they get here,” he had laughed through gritted teeth. “What’s my homework?” he had asked, and before she could answer, he had walked out the door. That had been the last day of Wes’s high school career.

Barely a year later, Wes wandered the streets of New York City, not the streets that everyone knows or loves, but the secret ones, the true image that lies behind the façade of every city. He was heavily stoned and paid no attention to where he was going. Wes had made his way groggily to a pay phone and somehow had remembered his home number. His mother had rasped an inquiry into the mouthpiece, “Who is this? You’re not on caller I.D., tell me, or I’m going to hang up,” her words were slurred together and she had obviously been drinking.

“Hey ma,” replied Wes, his voice tinny over the bad connection. “How are you doing? How’s Josh?” There was no reply, so Wes had asked again, “How are you ma?” Finally, after a few awkward seconds, she had answered, her voice wavering, like a spider’s web in the wind.

“Wesley? Is that you? Where are you? I’m fine,”…silence… “Your brother, he’s…” she had broken down then, her voice coming in harsh sobs, punctuated by heaving breaths. Wes had felt a sinking in the pit of his stomach, a rat coiled in his intestines, thrashing frantically, looking for escape. It is funny how much that rat and Wes had in common at that moment.

“Oh God, what is it Ma?” he asked in a voice reminiscent of his wasted childhood. “Is he…”

“No. No, he’s not dead” his mother had managed, and then, after another watery breath, “He’s been diagnosed with HIV and its pretty bad…he got it from a needle, that’s what the doctors say…” she had trailed off. Wes had been standing on a crowded city street, cars passed, people walked by him on both sides, but at that moment, none of that existed. He could only think of his brother Josh, Big Josh, who had let him open his presents on Christmas first. Josh, who had let him ride his bike along when he went out with girls. His older brother who had introduced him to hard drugs and was now dying. He could see Josh, hunched over in some infirmary, eyes hollowed out, ribs exposed, slowly decaying and looking almost angelic in his destruction. Josh lowered into the ground in a casket. A lost memory on the wind.

The conversation had gone downhill from there and when his mother had begged him to come home, he would have none of it. His final words to his mother were “I’m sorry,” and then the phone was in its cradle and his feet were taking him towards the worst part of town. Wes had needed something, anything, to make the pain go away, and later, he found it.

After the death of Josh, Wes went completely cold turkey. He took his entire stash of heroin and flushed it down the toilet and within minutes, he was regretting the decision. Twelve hours later, covered in cold sweat, his body burning with fever and heaving uncontrollably, he had sat up in his drenched bed. It was impossible. Exactly twenty-three minutes after that, he was on the street and seventeen minutes after that he was sharing a needle with a girl he knew named Shelia. The needle brought a feeling of equilibrium to his troubled mind and he was veiled in a blanket of water soaked wool. He and Shelia fell asleep next to each other in the gutter and that was the closest he had ever come to being in love.

Weeks passed and unless Wes had some heroin in his system he saw Josh on every street corner, on the face of every homeless man shivering on a stoop. Wes had needed heroin like his mother needed her children. The only difference between the two was that Wes had gotten what he needed.

It had swept the streets like wild fire, the dreaded message of death that was rained down from the wings of vultures, spewed from the most putrid and rat infested sewers. AIDS, HIV, DEATH. These were the proclamations of the public and people like Wes Hafner were avoided like the plague in all but the worst circles. Out of slight concern for himself, Wes went to a free clinic to get a test done. The waiting room was filled to the brim with the sick and the infirm and the wait itself was as thick as a coat of ice on a pond in the dead of winter. The door to his right opened and he blinked his eyes against the harsh fluorescents and the stood, walking across the dingy linoleum. “Hello Wesley,” said the nurse keeping her face, much to Wes’s fury, emotionless. “Please have a seat,” she said, keeping her mask of carelessness. He sat on an old plastic chair. She clutched a clipboard, glanced at it, and glanced up at Wes. And was that something in her eyes? A questioning flicker towards the door and perhaps a tinge of sorrow? Wes could not be sure. “Sir,” she said, and he braced himself for an unbearable blow. A pause and in that pause Wes had studied her. She couldn’t have been more than twenty nine and here she was, telling people whether they would live or die. In essence, whether or not they should even try to live. Her hair was light brown and mirrored her eyes. Her medical smock was frumpy and he had realized that her beauty had been stifled by her obligations. He had had the strong urge to take her hand, throw the clipboard to the floor and kiss her passionately on the lips. Wes had blinked and tried to force a grin. His life was balanced on a pin and wavering. It could have fallen to the right side or the wrong. It fell. “Mr. Wesley Hafner, you have been diagnosed with Human Immunodeficiency Virus. I’m so sorry,” said the nurse, and she had looked sorry. Wes, a sinking feeling polluting his stomach, had stood up, thanked her in a cracked voice and walked out of the room.

Fall came, bringing with it a harsh precursor to the inevitable winter chill and Wes Hafner breathed his last looking out of a fogged hospital window at four in the afternoon. His mother did not attend his funeral nor was she even aware of his death. In the dim light of a cold morning she found a letter in her mailbox. Making her way up the stairs to her decrepit flat, a tense hand on her quivering hip, she hummed a hymnal from ages past and grinned to herself. Back in the warmth of her apartment she slit open the letter and began to read. The season was an unforgiving one but the words she read prompted forgiveness in her. That night she had slept easy and a few weeks later passed quietly into the darkness.

 

Dear Mom,

I doubt that you’ll ever hear from or see me again because I am moving to Las Angeles with some friends. I love you very much and I want you to know that I am not leaving because of anything you did. I am wanted by the police for selling heroin; I thought I’d tell you that at the least. Maybe one day I’ll come back and see you but it’s very unlikely. I just want you to know that I am happy and I hope that in some way, you will find happiness too. Look around you Ma. New York is a beautiful place despite its first impression. It’s fall now and the leaves are beautiful in Central Park. It’s funny that I’ll never walk these paths again but I’m glad to go. The world is beautiful but painful too, Josh’s death has taught me that. I hope you’ve learned what I have. Have a good year Ma; I’ll call when I get the chance.

Love,

Wes

 

Reviews

[Emily Irene.]

Beautiful, amazing. Your analogies were very well done. I'd like to see something else like this, its a topic that interests me, as morbid as that is, hah. Anyway, again, well done and keep up the good work, dear sir.