Floridecays the spirit until you are a husk ready to be filled with a proprietary blend of every kind of human you never wanted to be but were. Driving back from the hospital, community gated, every house a pick from five patterns, all built in 2008, but unimportant to the sight of the woman standing on the sidewalk at the corner once you cross the bridge into the neighborhood over a canal that holds back swamp reclamation, a male Muscovy duck pounces on top of a female Muscovy duck to rape her. The woman’s teeth shine white. Her D&G sunglasses hide crow’s feet. She waves. Throw a backhanded peace sign at the scene and continue letting the car roll considering this was the first time coming through the gate in 56 days, the man looked your name up on the list, found it, and said in a flat voice, “Welcome back sir.” Never seen him before. He was white, a plank with a mustache, aging out of the state.
Boca Raton means Mouth of The Rat, get told. Mercedes in the mouth of the rat. The Mouth Of The Rat Country Club. Is the American Dream eight lanes of erratic traffic collapsing in paraboloid arcs around dropped palm fronds fighting to get to destinations despite lack of signal at speeds past state limits with no masks deep in red hat country while driving through the mouth of a rat? Never mind, you don’t need to know why Boca Raton translates to The Mouth of The Rat, just that it does. Whispering, don’t ruin this don’t ruin this moment, to yourself. Murcielago, in The Mouth of The Rat. Bat in the mouth of the rat. Shouldn’t this be in reverse? Or is there a point at which it doesn’t matter because both creatures can spread disease?
You wake up in a bed with red checked sheets wearing your clothes at six in the morning to get up and empty his pissbag and stuff food in your face and take your pills and take up residence bedside while the air cushion mattress inflates infinitely, purring catlike in a house with no pets, no animals aside from the wild coming in from outside. House has no steps either. Everything treated as a possible route of infection of the hole holy wounds packed and sealed even though decay is no longer actively happening.
Then a fever pops.
Then a leopard gecko not fast enough to take a picture of on the carpet.
Then waking up under a palm off the side of the road with blood on your clothes, aching, the sun stabbing eyeward, the consideration that there may be no going back.
Previously the gigantic Florida cockroach that flew in the face of god and terrified him before being found and dispatched under a molecular biology textbook. Heavy as stones, silver covered, tall white letters, THE CELL.
The textbook then left on the floor for weeks not wanting to deal with dead bug brains in rock hard carpet on top of having to worry about contamination and the groans of pain from the bedridden Lazarus.
The Rolling Over of the car in slow motion on repeat from the previous April playing YouTube in head snapping up conscious into the fact that no, someone else’s bed, borrowed. The alienating presence of the father of Lazarus who is the friend who had the online funeral last year when it was a sure thing he was going to die because he had five assholes, was carved to pieces, had died once from sepsis then was fighting osteomyelitis, but then, the infection ceded ground and there was not enough help at home once hospitals tossed Lazarus homebound so like when the car was rolled so again you rolled out to help. This time you flew first class.
Back home for the holidays after a three month stint with your decaying Lazarus and another Saint is snorting ketamine and drinking a bottle of vodka a night until she tries to hang herself and ends up in grippy socks at the last actual for real whole floor psych ward in the city.
“There are two kinds of friends in this world,” she starts.
“The kind that visit you in the psych ward or in federal prison,” you go on.
“And the kind that don’t,” she finishes.
They let her go on day five and her mother’s voice trembles on the phone that the cycle is going to get set to spin again, and it does. This time the documentation says BPD, BIPOLAR 1, DEPRESSIVE PSYCHOSIS. She decides not to take her antipsychotics because she has a dual PhD in neuroscience and pharmacology, and she wants to drink without further damaging her brain while out hollows her entire sinus cavity from tainted ketamine salts that she tests as the head scientist of the needle exchange. Self-harming every night and doing her part to diffuse the gospel of harm reduction during the day. She a Saint, the way she wants to hang herself from a crossbeam.
“I am no longer actively decaying,” Lazarus who is your friend who was dead but is risen but is crippled from an accident when he was fourteen but is now forty and his beard has gone mostly salt with some pepper says to you, and in that second you can only think of how this is funny because everything else in Florida is decaying at a pace strobing frenetically but frozen as was a good light show at a rave in a funeral parlor in 2008.
And never let it be said that the pursuit of happiness can’t be done through the mail and on the internet when you’re typing out my friend, my friend, my friend, I would like to purchase 120 2mg alprazolam for 335 dollars including shipping and by the way are you taking orders this week? They’re always taking orders. You were banned from using Western Union in 2010 for keeping a sloppy ledger in the middle of a drug nightmare a decade long.
And you can tell me what benzodiazepine you give me to chew up in a blind taste test, up to and including, bromazepam, flualprazolam, and several other French exotics not deeply studied but technically legal, highly potent, and not approved for use at any dosage of human consumption. This, not stopping the pills from being stepped on and pressed and sold as the real holy communion wafer, while a year later, after five thousand of those, you’re in Florida and the formerly decaying needs anti-anxiolytics so you hit up the friend, are you taking orders this week? And a week later the package arrives, always from the same address, always a cardboard envelope with a smuggler’s superstition of a vac pack of pills inside wrapped in carbon paper, wrapped in tape, wrapped in paper, and batch labeled. 13, 13, 26, 11, 28, 13. The pharmacy does a lot of business but it doesn’t matter because farmapram is identically pressed perfectly stackable and tests out under dual reagent the right colors when scraped into powder.
And to think, they let people like us work in labs and go out in public and even drive cars.
The only thing that stems Lazarus’ pain is hydromorphone, Dilaudid, ideally IV because in pill form the bioavailability of the chemical plunges into low double digits.
Wake up sweating in the sun with blood on you and you know, you just know that you’re missing one of your knives, probably the toss knife. Probably now tossed. Hoping this wasn’t a blackout.
Drive past a burning palm tree and consider the beauty of it but wonder how is that?
Every single crevice filled with octononogenarians decaying in front of you. At the wound care clinic, they shuffle or cart in wearing Louis Vuitton with sloppy wrapped wounds, blood seeping down their legs, Gucci slides though.
The fever goes six days. “I’m dying,” Lazarus repeats until Urgent Care sends you both to the hospital you were returning from when told welcome back sir.
Two steps forward, one step back and you get pulled into the swamp by an alligator.
Stay away from Miami for obvious reasons. Most of them being the scales of a fish and lives lived and left behind.
Driving back a carbon copy of the car rolled last year, but with enough provisions to set up in the McMansion Lazarus lies in for 90 days.
A knife that you buy with the express intent of it being cheap, easily disposable, and hard to trace. The purpose of the knife to be determined.
Waking up, the determination of the trajectory of the knife into flesh has passed from blood red to rusting brown and sweaty under the palm woken up under down off the turnpike in a pool of stink wearing your Sunday’s finest grey USPS single black stripe pants, tiger and cloud printed track jacket as shirt with nothing under it, and blood stains.
Everything in the hospital after the fever gets so bad, at Mouth Rat Regional, was donated by someone. Hospital lobby donated kindly by Bayer Monsanto. This Elevator entrance a gift from Raytheon Corporation. This bad painting donated by Jeffrey Epstein.
The sky above you bright blue opens wider to total eclipse black from horizon to horizon; the palm tree you wake bloody beneath bursts into flames raining down frond char. You just wanted to help.
🌴💊
