TRIGGER WARNING: YUCK

Grandmom wants some of the narcotic I've got stashed in my toe.

She has not been feeling well. There is some foreboding of decline and death, but for the time being she is relatively hale and is currently tending to the barbed wire, the weeds in the front lawn, and similar industry. She has already had one hit but she's welcome to another. She can finish it, and I tell her so without reservation. I don't need it.

It's not cocaine or speed, but it lends both euphoria and energy. That Grandmom has been sick is all the more reason to give her some: it'll make her strong. It is clearly not a drug of this world. It has neither the moral nor the morbid stigma attached to street drugs. Still, I do have a stash of it in my toe.

I am thinking about Bill G——. "Remember that friend of mine I brought over once? Bill?"

Grandmom is on her hands and knees between the dining room and living room, inscrutably cleaning. She suddenly remembers who I mean: "Yeah! with that damn lawn chair."

"Wait—Bill broke a chair as well?" It doesn't occur to me until that moment that we had earlier discussed another friend who had broken another of her chairs; they're racking up. "What is it with my friends and your chairs?"

"I dunno." She looks old suddenly: saggy, with thinning hair. She is busy on the front lawn, alongside the fence. I try to remember the last I heard of Bill, whom I once loved end-of-the-world achingly and who once betrayed that love because ew, faggotry. I consult my clippings; this one is probably from LiveJournal: "Porn star Talvin Demachio...

... [or possibly it was Lance Navarro] ...

 ...[photo credit me] and I went to see Bill last night at the —— Theatre," it starts. So Bill's a showgirl. Somehow, the old LJ information is enough for me to know how to contact him again. Knowing is enough, I discover.

"Got one more for an old lady?" Grandmom asks. I give her my foot. [My foot does not detach but my joints—joints in general, I suppose—are far more accommodating here than in life. The sore does not hurt, even when plied.] "I told you, have as much as you want. Have it all." The stash is inside an infection on the plantar side of the knuckle between the great right distal and proximal phalanges. Fortunately the unnamed narcotic is still snortable when coated in pus. Grandmom goes for a polite sniff and I tell her again to have more. "Here, squeeze it," I say, and I squeeze it so that more crystalline goodness comes oozing out on a tide of pus. She snorts it.

There is no disgust here, no embarrassment. I love Grandmom [rather more jovially and less complicatedly here than I did in real life] and am happy to give her my drugs. I want her to feel better. I'm not sure why my stashbox is internal, but neither of us give it a second thought. Maybe when you have a festering sore, you just make use of it. In this case, at least, it is no more awkward than handing off a tiny silk purse with nummies inside.

I discern that Joe F—— (one of several people in an enormous bed with me) wants another snort, too, so I give him my foot.  I can't really attest to ever having loved Joe, achingly or otherwise, but holy motherfucking shit was that man beautiful back in Newark, 20-few years ago. Unlike Grandmom he is dissatisfied with the phalangeal proceeds and says, "Damn, here I am, just getting these half-assed—" but at that moment a wave of the drug hits him and he shuts up.

"See," I say, "you got some." I roll over in bed and I am awake and alone.

Out in the city; out in the woods

'The map is not the territory,' I tell myself, mantra-like; I certainly don't need reminding that that tangle of loops and swoops on the city map I'm studying is not the same thing as the mess in which I have repeatedly gotten lost driving. This tangle, on an overcast day, gives no hints where compass points are; and the ambiguity of the signage suggests calculated malice. Malice of whorethought. As can be the case with the Potomac-bank Federal space of naughtwest D.C. (which this is not—this city is brand new), you really need to memorize a lot of cues by rote, count exits, etc. I am counting exits on paper and trying to commit them to memory.

Once I've got through this mess and am back in familiar environs, however, the remaining question is the fastest way to get back north through the city to my own neighborhood. Jimmy and I are driving both our cars and keeping abreast each other, though we're talking quietly and casually as if sharing one car's interior. Usually I take the parkway, even though it's cumbersome to get to and curves around a lot. He recommends [Whatsit] Street, along the city's eastern corridor; it's on the city grid but the traffic lights are timed well for efficient travel. Jimmy's in the wrong lane, to my left—his lane veers off onto some ramp or other—so I tell him to cut in front of me when the light turns green. He does, and moments later for no apparent reason we are in a single car following the route he suggested.

We talk about stopping for a drink. There are numerous hole-in-the-wall bars along this corridor, and on a seize-the-day sort of whim he pulls barely to a stop in front of one and I jump out to case the joint while he parks. At least that's what I assume is happening. I go in and see what's what: Spartan would be a good word. Mostly unpopulated (zero staff in immediate evidence), *profoundly* undecorated, bright as a classroom, it reminds me of nothing so much as the raw bar at the end of the Berlin "Auction". One long tawny-stained bar with a few stools and a single beer tap: Bud Light. Ugh, I think, but I'll drink it if Jimmy will. I wait. He does not appear. Maybe I mistook his intention? Well, It's not like I'm saving a spot for us in a crowded room, so I go out into the street and look around. I look all the way around the block. Parking is plentiful but I cannot find him. I go back inside.

When he finally arrives, it turns out Jimmy is now Séain, who has stopped at home and changed into drag before joining me. It's middle-aged Tory woman drag, very Terry Jones, but it somehow works on him. We sit down and start drinking beer.

A later sequence takes place at an unnamed friend's large and gorgeous house in the woods. He is an older man and I am a younger woman. (Whatever the gender, my dream age lags a good two decades behind my actual age.) We are apparently on one day-long multi-pronged errand to make a big dinner. Probably for guests who have not yet arrived. We have been out shopping and have been conversing on the long walk home about life as we're stuck with it: the species, the biosphere; emotion and outlook. After a long stretch of such conversation I have nearly convinced myself that politics is entirely irrelevant. I am lighthearted. Politics is personal, I say, and I personally don't care!

We have gotten back to the house and at the fork in the unpaved path I veer left, to my host's surprise. It is my first visit and I'm just getting acquainted with both house and property. The path on the right heads toward the kitchen, and we have groceries in hand. It occurs to me that this is our second grocery errand of the afternoon and that we had veered right on returning from the first. I should have remembered this, but it doesn't matter. The left path takes us to the front door, and it's no long haul from there to the kitchen.

It occurs to me I am almost certainly going to end the night ahead by having sex with my host. Even though I am a woman in this scene, I worry about how Paul will feel about this. Anyway, cooking dinner is the important thing for now; it's not clear when the guests will arrive. When they do, though, they are kittens, and they wake me up.