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Stickman

 

The guy at the door doesn’t look like Danny, though a case could be made for the nose. A mashed in version, dramatically scabbed and weather beaten, and the hair, filthy but spiked in defiance. A strange, Dan-like head on a body that would make an anorexic flinch. Withered limbs swimming in cutoffs and stained polo shirt. Dead-end Danny after the rock fight. It couldn’t be, yet the voice assures us it is—the South Philly accent, unmistakable.

“What have you done to the real Danny?” my wife demands.

“C’mon Andree, let me in.”

It was little more than a year ago, during the last dismal round in his squabble with the hospital administration that we saw him last. Bloodied but unbowed, he vowed to fight them to the end. Master of the cat and mouse game of drug counseling, Danny was as close to a legend as anyone in that line is likely to get. Confrontational, abrasive, street-wise to a fault, he did what you have to do to reach the reachable. The bureaucrats were another story. The end was never really in doubt.

Now he’s sitting in my kitchen eating Fruit Loops and making phone calls. The calls are brief. No one wants to hear from Danny these days. We’d heard rumors but nothing could have prepared us for the wreckage. I console myself with a single thought. Originally, he was Andree’s friend.

“I won’t give you money,” she sets the limit.

“Two bucks? Two bucks and I’m outa here.”

“I’m a nurse. I can’t give you money to cop.”

Strange, after all these years to hear her talk the talk again. He turns to me.

“Tom?”

“Jesus, what can you get for two bucks?”

He smiles. By God, it IS Danny.

“Where’s Libby and the kids?” Andree asks. Again he smiles.

 ***

Somewhere in the depths of her secretary desk is an in-house magazine with a faintly sneering Danny on the cover. Pre-crash and burn addict-savant in a black leather jacket. In the archives of the very hospital that fired him is a Dan directed recovery video that leaves the unaddicted feeling strangely unversed. What have we to overcome?

“Where’s little Danny?” Andree grills him. He mumbles something unintelligible.

It is her job to disapprove. Dazzled as I am by the plunge, the physical devastation, the ridiculous polo shirt, I try not to stare. It occurs to me that the bulk of the homeless once had a home and a bathroom and a closet full of clothes. This will not always be the case. The next generation is fast upon us.

He pours a small mountain of sugar on his Fruit Loops and we watch as it dissolves. The tattoos have not fared well, the dagger on his bicep reduced to a hatpin, the naked lady shriveled to a smudge. But it is the shirt that gets me. In real life Danny would not own such a thing.

Andree plays the nurse/interrogator to Danny’s strung out supplicant. They speak in code, a mix of medicalese and doper slang. All the while Danny smokes my cigarettes and shovels in the cereal. It’s a toe to toe performance, masters of the genre, Andree projecting tough love with a no bullshit bottom line, Danny, in a perfect blend of psychic pain and sardonic wit. I sit fiddling with my fingers, in the loop but out of my league.

“You want something else to eat?” I ask him. “A sandwich maybe?”

“No way, Jose. This guy gave me a sausage sandwich yesterday,” he clutches at what’s left of his stomach. “Tried to kill me, I tell ya. I said later for you, Mr. Sausage.”

Danny has a jargon all his own, Port Richmond patois laced in goofy names and words you have to look up

“I got some green chile salsa,” I make a joke. They roll their eyes and tune me out. Different treatment centers are suggested and rejected. Andree persists, Danny resists. References to HIV are impossibly oblique, pauses mostly, a hardening of the eye. It’s a pointless exchange when you stop and think. Danny invented the game. If anyone knows where the treatment centers are it’s him.

I slip him three bucks under the table.

“You need a ride somewhere?”

He reaches past me and steals another cigarette.

“Florida,” he gives a wink. “Winter’s coming, don’t you know.”

For the next hour Andree works the phone, calling in a decades worth of markers. The old girl network of admission nurses finds a place for him in the Benton Institute, though he has no medical card or even valid ID. During the negotiations Danny tells me about the car he shares with a friend on the west side.

“Well at least you can get around.” I put my clueless spin on things. His look says later for you Mr. Andree.

He was clean for seven years. Worked a job, got married, bought a house and had kids. Amazing what you can do in seven years. At the reception for his son’s christening he commandeered the stage to serenade his bride. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house. Neighborhoods. Where you can still be a hero, or even worse.

 ***

A week later we go to see him. Benton Institute, with it’s pillared porches and fairway grounds looks more Main Line then medicinal  It’s present function, as unlikely as it’s location. Walled off from surrounding badlands, a fair share of the city’s pipers could walk there in minutes. We meet him at the med station, still wasted but showered and shaved. The only patient we’ll see who looks like a patient.

“They’re cutting me down to 40 milligrams a day,” he complains as he leads us down lavish hallways to his room. “I mean what ever happened to coddling?”

“You’re here to get well, not to get high,” Andree tows the line. As usual, my presence is not required. I trail behind them scanning the paintings and Queen Anne furniture.

“Nice place,” I tell him.

“Oh yeah, it’s like drying out in Graceland. I heard some of the rooms even have fireplaces.”

His is a corner suite with a view of the rose garden. Two single beds and a chest of drawers. Fireplace. Despite our protests he insists on showing us his feet, which have suffered some withdrawal related malady too gruesome to get into. My own toes curl in sympathy. Andree turns away.

“Will they get better?” I ask him.

Danny shrugs and wiggles the big ones at me.

“Will we?” the right one wonders in falsetto.

“Beats me,” the left one bows from the waist.

 ***

He didn’t last long at the Institute. A late night phone call confirmed, Danny checked out against medical advice. The news came as no surprise and whatever comes next will not include us. And I’m thinking, clawing your way back should be enough. Do the right thing and the right things should happen. But the way of addiction rigs it different. When the game is never over, how can you win?

You don’t hear much about crackheads these days, but that’s just because we got tired of listening, too much to worry about, troubles of our own. In the meantime they’re out there hitting rock bottom, the scufflers, the sidewalk sleepers, the stickman who used to be Danny.

 

Tom Larsen has been a fiction writer for fifteen years with work appearing in Newsday, New Millennium Writing, Puerto del Sol and Antietam Review.

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Turn

by Leon Geist

Wake. Rotate hand then arm. Stop. Reach for side table with stretched fingertips, touch the gold metal lamp base and turn on the light bulb that flickers, lights, flickers. Bad bulb, or maybe it’s not bad at all. It only behaves badly.

Lay flat again. Coil springs push through a much worn mattress curved low in the middle with a faint yellow-orange stain outlined in brown, scented in Clorox. Nurse had tried to clean the urine away while discussing cost effectiveness and new mattresses.

Springs push at ribs, thigh backs, shoulders, heads. Two heads are helpful on days when waking requires two minds—one to choose to get out of bed, the other to plead for staying, though the option is not up to either head. The legs and the heads do not talk properly anymore. It’s the nerves. They flicker sometimes.

Nurse comes for me and I hate her though I wish she would wash me more thoroughly down there where I can’t feel anymore. She’s an ugly nurse, old and stocky, and I hate her because she can make me hard just by washing me.

The chair sits, waiting for me today as it does every day and I hate it, too, the chair. Nurse pulls my legs to the side of the bed, lifts me, turns us like dancing so that she can sit me properly in my chair. She lets go before touching, so that I drop a few inches, rattle, shake from the jar of it. She does it on purpose. The straps are uncomfortable on my chest, the neck brace rubs at the back, below my hairline and I imagine that little men hold me there with stick pins and screws. I think a blister has started where the skin is raw.

The bulb flickers again and I think to turn, observe what I can already see reflected off walls and the white of nurse’s uniform. I think to turn because the habit has not forced itself out of me yet and in my mind, I turn, rise up from the chair and yell at that bulb to stop its fucking flickering, but the brace holds my head straight forward as nurse feeds me runny scrambled eggs on a spoon, sips of orange juice through a straw. She never gives me coffee. I hate her.

Before nurse leaves, she places me in front of the window covered in slats of horizontal gray metal and it is as if slats on my cage though they go the wrong way for a cage. The bulb flickers again. I can see it in the window glass between metal slats like glowing about my flickering body that, in the glass, appears to be dancing in strobe lights.

After nurse puts me back in bed then turns out the light, I wait for morning and the chair and my slatted window, hoping for a sponge bath.

 

Leon Geist lives in North Carolina with a cat. This is his first published story.

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Camera Obscura

Camera Oscura

by Foust

Just for a split second, this moment was important. You held the camera at waist-level and peered down into the box’s glass window. Later, you pressed the viewfinder up to your face. Squint. Hold still. Click. You had to wait a while to see what you had done. Early on, you mailed the whole camera off to Rochester. They would return it loaded with new film when they sent your photos to you. Eventually, you took the film to the drugstore, or drove up to a little kiosk in the middle of a parking lot.

When you opened up the envelope, were you surprised?

Why didn’t anyone warn you there would be an ambush when you stepped out of the privy?

Aunt Emma has really aged, hasn’t she?

That Floyd can sleep through anything.

Whose dog was that? No one remembers a dog being there.

After you passed the pictures around, after everyone saw them, where did you put them? In a drawer in the guest room. In a shoebox in the attic. On the black paper pages of a leather-bound album. Maybe you threw out the unflattering ones—like the one where the sun paved lemon rectangles across your face, or the one that made you finally throw away that horrible pair of slacks that always rode up in the back. Maybe you sent some to friends. Or pressed the good ones into a hinged desktop frame—their subjects forever forced to look at each other out of the corners of their eyes.

At any rate, this moment was important, wasn’t it? Even though no one remembers why.

 

Foust received an MFA in creative writing from Spalding University in Louisville in 2008, and a BFA in Illustration from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia in 1985. Her stories have appeared in places like Minnetonka Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Word Riot, and Wrong Tree Review.  She lives with Melvyn, her wonderful husband, and Mia, Honey, and Grace, her three spoiled dogs, in the Forest Hill Park section of Richmond, Virginia.