Frankie "Two Bones"
People drank a steaming, green ooze from Dixie cups; seemingly handed out left and right by the food truck behind the ferris wheel. Frankie's Diner was giving em out: two for one special that day. Adults, dressed like children with dirty faces ran about, staring; monsters shot each other with steaming ooze out of trombones and fleshy-looking saxophones—terror was not far behind.
Frankie saw himself sitting on his old purple '65 Chevy Impala he and Barry used to ride around in, smoking--but right now he was playing his guitar: an old Silvertone his uncle had given him; Frankie's first. “There's a Red House over yonder / That's where my baby stay..” Frankie heard Jimi sing, like a dream—where you hear things you don't see, and you are who you aren't. “I ain't been home to see my baby / in about 99 and ½ days.” Frankie felt like he himself was singing, though he couldn't actually feel his lips move: “Wait a minute, something's wrong, wrong, wrong...” Frankie could hear the guitar twang! beneath his [Jimi's ?] fingers, though he could not feel the strings. This last point was quite probably due to the fact that Frankie had spent the better part of the last 72 hours holding a cheap lighter, broken open and rigged to produce a flame five times its normal height, either beneath one of those metal caps given out in the health department's “safety packs” (a kit of sterile water, syringes, tourniquets, etc., doled out to local junkies), or towards the business-end of a pipe. The line of work was hell on one's fingertips. And it had been a long time since Frankie could say his fingertips were aching from playing the guitar instead of shootin dope.
“But that's alright, I still got my guitar—look out now!” And Hendrix proceeded to wail-on into one of his trademark soul-searing solos.
But like most dreams where you're about to get laid, or get high (or in this case, hear Jimi Hendrix play the guitar) you wake up.
And fuck if Frankie “Two Bones” Nelson wished that hadn't happened.
Although the preceding reverie had been somewhat disturbing (Frankie always had bad dreams while kicking) it was nothing compared to the utter hell he knew he would be experiencing soon enough. It had been about 36 hours since Frankie had (this time willingly) checked himself into the Terrace Pointe rehab facility. It called itself a "rehab facility"—it was more like a detention center with nurses—but was a “sliding-scale” (which, for most dope-fiends, of course, meant “free”) state-ran rehab where addicts could go, on relatively short notice, to try and get clean.
Frankie had explicitly asked the intake nurse if he would be permitted to leave the facility on his own accord—to which the nurse ensured Mr. Nelson that he would not be allowed to leave once he checked in. Frankie figured this was for the best because he knew he could too easily be tempted to leave if the going got rough—and the going was started to get real fuckin' rowdy. The no-leave policy was also to ensure the rehab didn't become, to use one nurse's term, a “revolving door." Frankie could dig it. But right now, he could give a shit what he had agreed to. Things were getting serious, and he needed to fix.
In a last-ditch effort to be sure he was not left totally in the lurch, Frank had had the wherewithal to stash a little piece in his car; which happened to be waiting just outside, in the parking lot across the street.
But first, he would have to convince the morning staff to let him the fuck out of there.
He had already joked with some of the nurses on the night shift the evening before (one of them was actually pretty cute) about leaving. They had responded, mildly amused, and joked lightly with Frankie into the night--until Frankie had finally been able to get some sleep for what felt like it couldn't have been more than a few minutes: tossing and turning, images of demented circuses and poisons flowing through his mind: Jimi Hendrix soloing over a Calypso beat while freaks danced, drinking toxic waste.
Frankie had always heard, and been "told by professionals,” that "no one in history" had ever died from opiate withdrawal. ("Yeah," he remembered thinking to himself, "they just wished for it..)
Offing himself had never really been something Frankie had considered all-too seriously in the past; but it was quickly beginning to look like a real possibility if he didn't do something soon.
If he could just get to his car.
Aching, every tendon in his body stretching without permission, Frankie creaked out of bed. Throwing the sweat-soaked sheet from his legs, he saw, from the corner of his eye, a glint. A kind of recognition that is unknowing, and yet sparks some kind of vibrant, unconscious excitement.
Frankie crawled. He could not stand. His roommate was in the day room watching Judge Judy with the rest of the group. (“Oh hell naw!” He heard one of his peers shout at the television.)
Two Bones loomed over the tiny piece of foil, crumpled and shining like a grail.
Feverishly, but ever so gently, Frankie held the drug between his fingers. He could smell its relief; but he could not yet taste it.
All his fear, all his pain, washed away as he was already imagining the satisfaction he would feel when he hit that piece...
And if it weren't for that nurse, who happened to barrel through his un-lockable dorm-room door at just that very moment, Frankie "Two Bones" Nelson might not have made history that day.
2017