On that day that Mike lost everything twenty-two years earlier, the morning elbowed its way in through a familiar dope afterburn. He wavered toward wakefulness, the coke and whiskey providing alternating surges of spikiness and immutable unconsciousness. As he fought off the daylight through still-closed eyes, he also felt the residual tweak of some pretty rank heroin.
The band had been dry for weeks, unable to score from their fans or local dealers as they played their way up the East Coast from Georgia, but the girl who brought him home the night before was connected. As he scratched himself beneath her sheets and felt her lying beside him, he assumed she provided the smack.
Most days on the road began like this for Mike, who hadn’t yet turned twenty-three when it all fell apart. After tearing up whichever club Gravel Rash performed in, the lead singer had first dibs on the tail assembled backstage to carry the party into the dawn. Sometimes they went at it in the dressing room or on the bus, sometimes the girl had a hotel room if she and some friends took to following the band from stop to stop. And sometimes she just took him home.
Shit, Mike thought that morning as he fought to stay unconscious for another hour. He had to piss. He was going to have to get up, take a leak, and get himself back to the tour bus before it left for the next town. The girl usually drove him back to the previous night’s venue to hook up with the rest of the band.
“Hey,” he grumbled over his shoulder, jabbing an elbow into the girl passed out behind him. “C’mon, you gotta get me outta here.”
His eyes were thick with sleep gunk; what the fuck did she give him last night? He rubbed them clean and then squinted in the morning sun piercing in through her window. The girl had dingy pink sheets and a pillowcase lined with hearts. The room was shabby and small. Mike vaguely remembered the house and the whole neighborhood being low rent when they stumbled in at whatever time that was. The place smelled like bologna and old onions.
He sat up and felt the full toxic headbutt from the previous night’s party. His stomach sloshed queasily as he rubbed his forehead.
“Hey!” he growled, rolling to face the girl and finally seeing all the red. In the same instant, he realized that the dark matter caked into his eyes was her blood.
He swiped away the sheets to see a syringe drying in the sticky mess. Her skin cold and blue, her forearm still dribbled blood at the point where she pierced an artery. Mike bolted from beside her, standing cold, naked, and tattooed at her bedside.
“Fuck!” he whispered desperately, his body painted in streaks of red. “Fuck me!!!”
He pushed the girl at her hip, hoping for signs of life. “Hey…” He didn’t know her name. “Hey!”
Mike’s heart raced as the dope fog left his brain. He sized up the room, went to the window: it wasn’t a house, it was an apartment. Four floors up. Just one way out.
His clothes were thrown throughout the room and tangled with hers. He found his tight, tattered jeans and tried to pull them on, hopping on one foot and then the other. One fake snakeskin boot was right where he needed it to be; the other finally turned up under her bed.
His shirt had ended up in bed with them; it was too bloody to put back on. He went to her closet and found a too-small yellow blouse that he wrestled to make fit. He spit into another of her shirts and tried to scrub the blood away from his face and arms.
Ready to bolt, he turned again to her naked body. He darted around to her side of the bed and touched his fingers to her throat. There was no pulse; not a trace of body temperature remained.
“Fuck me!” Mike whimpered, then tried to not rattle the doorknob of her room with his violently shaking hand.
He walked briskly and dead sober down the narrow hallway. She lived a dumpy, just-getting-by life; the place was small and the door out was an easy reach. Only when near escape did he hear Rugrats jabbering from the curtain-cloaked living room. A boy of four or five sat in a trance in front of the TV, but he turned long enough to stare blankly at Mike from the shadows.
Mike ran.
* * *
The early morning sun was a bitch as he hit the sidewalk, trying to hold himself to an inconspicuous trot.
Her apartment building was on a main drag, the street already choked with people heading to work. Mike kept his head down as he bustled past dog walkers and blacks and Hispanics mottled glumly at bus stops.
When he came to a public park he hit the open field and broke into a fast jog. His mind was churning frenetically, his mouth parched.
It was her smack, he told himself. Her rig she killed herself with. Mike didn’t like needles. He knew from the raw-nerved sizzle in his nostrils that he snorted some with her, but no way would his prints turn up on that syringe.
Just get to the bus, he commanded himself, his lungs starting to burn. Get to the bus, get out of town. Eddie and the label’s lawyers would help him deal with whatever he was responsible for.
He reached another busy street and took the sidewalk east before stopping: he didn’t know where he was. He couldn’t remember the name of the club they played the night before, or where he would find the tour bus.
He didn’t even know what town he was in. Passing license plates said Rhode Island.
He fell into a panicked spin, looking for landmarks that were never going to come. People began to stare at this lanky, tattooed scuzzball in a too-small yellow blouse and what appeared to be blood on his face. He caught their looks and fell back into his driven walk.
A liquor store. A rack of the town’s free alternative paper. Mike stopped, feeling like a genius. He tore through the paper to the club listings. There was his Gravel Rash logo, hyping their show at The Station in West Warwick the night before.
The club was on a main drag, he knew it. Maybe the next one over. He could see golden arches two blocks down; that could be the McDonald’s where they ate the night before.
He jutted into the busy street to get to the other side, but he misjudged the pace of the oncoming traffic. He had to hit a complete run to make the curb within the short break in cars. There hadn’t been time to get his socks on. His cheap boots rubbed his bare feet raw.
And there was water in his ear, fucking with his balance. The sun beating down on him, cars beginning to honk, the other sidewalk still too far across. The more ground he covered, the farther the opposite side seemed to be retreating.
One car nearly clipped him as his legs began splaying clumsily. He instinctively tugged at his ear, trying to right his equilibrium. His finger came away, and the jolt at finding the girl’s blood in his ear finally threw his legs into a tangle. He hit the asphalt hard, his face sandpapering across the grit as his front teeth snapped at the roots. His right leg twisted crookedly at the knee.
A car swerved to miss him, diverting another driver straight into a light pole. More squealing brakes, more sour metallic thumps as fender benders dominoed in both directions.
People leapt angrily from their cars to inspect the damage and ream out the long-haired dumbfuck bleeding and crying in the middle of the street.
An hour later, as a cop lowered him into the backseat of the squad car, bystanders clapped cruelly. It would be the last applause Mike would hear for a long time.