I returned to his place early, around maybe seven, just a few hours after I’d left to make a desperate try at sleep. The sleep thing hadn’t happened. No surprise

I returned to his place early, around maybe seven, just a few hours after I’d left to make a desperate try at sleep. The sleep thing hadn’t happened. No surprise. Over the course of the previous night, we had snooted enough coke to kill a tour bus full of veteran rock stars.

At home, all I’d managed was to warm the couch for a while, face numb, mouth drought-dry, eyes totally bugged, heart wheezing and sputtering, my focus locked on a Tony Little infomercial. It was the most interesting shit I’d ever seen. (Case closed, coke is the fucking devil.) When Tony gave way to Folgers adverts and a.m. news shows and I still hadn’t caught a single z, I said fuck-all and headed back from whence came.

As usual, I could smell his apartment even before I got to the door. If cleanliness is really next to godliness, then there is a special place in hell reserved for people like my friend. I didn’t bother knocking, just let myself in. I expected to find him exactly as I’d left him: Compulsively tuning his Fender Strat, turning the pegs ever so slightly this way, ever so slightly that way, occasionally stroking out a chord, muttering conspiratorially all the while.

“It’s me,” I called, stepping over the old pizza boxes and Styrofoam cups that littered the apartment floor like landmines litter a Croatian soccer pitch. “Yo?”

No answer. I pushed open his bedroom door and slipped in. He was flat on his back, limbs sprawled across his bed, purple cock protruding from stained briefs like a bulb-topped stalk of fungus. A syringe dangled from his arm, the needle plunged deep into his main. I swore under my breath and sat gently upon the bed. I felt for a pulse in his wrist. Weak, but not too weak. Weak, but I’d felt worse.

I slid the syringe from his arm and held it up to the light, the only light in the room, a bulb dangling from a wire that snaked down through a hole in the ceiling. It was a full CC syringe, oldish looking, with a long needle. The plunger was nearly down. A spit’s worth of black-red blood remained choked at the neck.

I put the syringe in an empty mug on the cluttered nightstand, which was piled high with song books and scribble-covered notebook pages. I put my ear to his chest and listened to his heart. Tha . . . thud . . . . . . tha . . . thud. I looked at his sallow face and his tight milky skin, his junk skin, his skin the color of dandelion milk.

“You almost did it this time,” I said. I glanced at the syringe in the mug. “Thanks for sharing.”

I pulled a cum-speckled sheet over his lower half and went to the guitar and started fiddling around. We’d nearly finished the last song of the demo the night before. It was still rough, but I knew it would be solid in the end. It was about my twat of an ex-girlfriend and I couldn’t wait to sing it at a show to a hundred screaming chicks, every one with tits firmer than hers, pussies sweeter; tongues, hands, and ass muscles more skillful.

We’d gone together for a while before the ultimatum, which dropped like an A-bomb: “Its me or the band,” she’d said, to which I’d said, “Look for me on MTV,” to which she’d jabbed me in the throat and called me a cocksuckler (that’s suckler, with an ‘L’). Yeah, and to think she’d been so sweet at first . . .

That’s when it struck me, the name for the new song: “Look For Me on MTV.”

I pronounced it slowly, savoring each word, each syllable: “Look. For. Me. On. M. T. V.”

“That’s weak,” said my friend.

I jumped a little.

“Take it easy,” he said, rubbing his yellow eyes, propping himself up against a pillow streaked with long black hairs. “It’s not like I was dead or nothing.”

I put the guitar down.

“Watch it with that,” he exclaimed, shaking his hands at the Fender. “It’s my baby, fucker.”

He rubbed his arm, which was reddened and spotted with pale raised blotches around the injection site.

“You’re the one who needs to watch out,” I said. “You almost killed yourself.”

“Oh.”

“Oh?”

He shrugged. “It was a good hit. Sweet rush.”

I cussed him out. He took the verbal beating in silence. When I finished he asked, “You done?”

It was my turn to shrug. He got up, tucked his junk back into his briefs, and shuffled uneasily over to his bureau. He removed a tiny envelope of folded manilla paper from the top drawer and shook it in my face.

He said, “You look like you were up all night.”

“I was.”

“You look like you could use some R and R.”

“I could.”

He smiled a weak smile.

Ten minutes later and I was in tip-top shape. What a difference a poke can make. Man.

We set to work on the chorus, which he thought needed a harmony. I wanted to keep it simple. We settled on lushing up the link and keeping the chorus as it was.

Noon came and we realized almost simultaneously that we were both starved. With the speed the night before, we’d skipped dinner, and breakfast, too, but the dope had loosened our stomachs.

He threw on jeans and a t-shirt and a sweater and I borrowed a windbreaker because the Occtober wind had picked up. The walk to the restaurant was quiet. I listened to the dry rustle of the pear trees that back then lined Main Street, and the scratching song the leaves make as they cartwheel over pavement.

At the restaurant, we choose a booth in the far back corner, away from the moms who’d brought their kiddies out for lunch. I was feeling swell, like I had my own personal sun and it was sha-sha-shining happily on the face. My friend seemed faded, though, a shot or two over the line.

“You good,” I asked.

“Don’t worry,” he said, so I didn’t.

I fell into the menu and when the waitress came over and gasped I wondered what the hell was up. I looked up from the menu and saw my friend, face down in a little bowl of soy sauce.

“Jeez,” I sighed, reaching across the table and grabbing his hair and using it to lift his head up. A clump of hair ripped from his scalp and his head crashed back to the table.

The waitress shouted something foreign.

“No, no,” I explained, pointing to him, “He’s just a junky.”

And then, like Lazarus pickled in skag, he rose up gracefully and spread his arms and grinned wickedly. “Yeah,” he said, “A guitar junky.”

-Philip P

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