Parable of the Addicts

               

                                                                              “Parable of the Addicts”

                                                                                Thomas W. Helminski












THE HOUR WAS either too late or far too early for them to do anything that anyone might reasonably expect them to do. Moreover, the city walls towered above them at a height which prohibited scaling; the fortified stockade-plank gate—constructed from saguaro lumber—seemed to be locked up tight; and none of them had anything more than the insight provided by speculation or utter conjecture to inform them as to what, if even anything at all, awaited them beyond the forbidding confines of those sandstone ramparts. Yet, one by one, all six in turn, each of them in his or her peculiar idiosyncratic manner, they moved in for closer inspection of the colossal portcullis.
  Some lingered longer than the others at the foot of the portal: some of these who did linger—or malinger, as the case may have been—did actually have real goals to achieve from their careful examination or scrutiny. Others only stayed before the doorway ephemerally, giving the impression of doing so only in an act of aloof mimicry. Eventually, however, each of them arrived—in their own unique manners—at some form of solution he or she was willing to share with the remainder of the cabal.
  Dolores was the first to inspect the gate, its locking mechanism, and, in an ancillary way, the group’s meager options. Acute withdrawal from an opiate dependency filled her with both hopelessness and the inevitable lassitude commensurate with any formidable junk habit. Besides misery, the algebra of need, and the strangely comforting equanimity of vicissitude, Dolores knew but one thing: junk and the inexorable search for it were all that would ever matter to her. She gave up trying within mere seconds. Well, she thought, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, I guess. She knocked several times, awaiting an answer of some sort between raps. None came.
  “Oh, the hell with it,” Dolores declaimed. “I’m gonna curl up in a little cocoon-like ball over here,” she explained, “and wait them out, if they ever do answer.” Dolores moped away sullenly. “Somebody gimme a nudge if and when something happens around here.”
  “Yeah,” Kenny agreed. “She’s right.” His desire to formulate another plan of his own dissipated into oblivion within the pungent cloud of marijuana smoke he exhaled after burning off the last pull from his last joint. “Yeah, sure,” he continued, “’the hell with it!’ That’s my motto, too!” He twirled a nappy dreadlock around his yellowed, stinking finger as if for emphasis. “Let’s just crash here until morning or something. They’re bound to let us in some time.”
  Lucinda Diamond was the perennially obsequious one of the bunch. “That’s the stupidest goddam idea I’ve ever heard,” she argued. “If we all think together real hard-like,” she explained in an LSD induced stupor, “I’ll bet we can all just teleport right through the keyhole!” Lucy then tittered triumphantly for a moment before Benderhoffer approached in his usually gruff and surly manner, shoving little Lucinda Diamond aside with a mean snorting harrumph.
  Benderhoffer was a rough and rowdy, belligerent and bawdy, miserable, mean-type drunk, who enjoyed nothing more than to seek out scenes of gratuitous violence or other assorted varieties of ruckus, fracas, or donnybrook in which he could participate—win, lose, or draw. He never cared one lick if he ever won or lost a brawl; Benderhoffer just thrived on brutality and any part he could take in it, whether directly or otherwise.
  “Aah, you’re all just a bunch of goddam nancies,” he exclaimed in a snide baritone, which sounded so confident of its own veracity and omniscience that Benderhoffer took some kind of special delight in this and smirked pusillanimously with a distinct twinge of unabashed self-approval. “I say we just beat down this goddam door.”
  “Violence is totally bogus, dickhead,” Kenny interjected in a voice that could move the indecisive to consider at least the existence of choice.
  “And be done,” Benderhoffer struggled to add.
  “Yeah, no mean shit!” Lucy added plaintively; her demure amendment to Kenny’s anthem-like decree sounded almost as if it were three and a third parts admonition and five and one quarter parts desperate plea.
  “With all this half-stepping nonsense,” Benderhoffer finally concluded. “You goddam nancies all just standing around here with your fucking thumbs up your asses like a bunch of . . .” Something caught not only Benderhoffer’s attention, but his waspishly probative pique as well.
  Glover the speed freak, though, who had been erstwhile shaving splinters of varying shapes and sizes from the wooden door, suddenly had the look of a man who has just now discovered—whether by epiphany or careful study is moot—an infinite myriad of answers to an equally infinite litany of anything but questions. “If I get the right size dowels out of this mother,” he ruminated, although it wasn’t clear if this was more to himself or someone else, “I’ll be able to pick this goddam lock and I’ll just let the whole gaggle of us right in.”
  “Does that include me?” asked a semi-somnambulant Dolores.
  But no sooner had Dolores begged this question than, with a curiously disorienting and thunderously rending sound, the gigantic gate exploded from its hinges, obviously—by anyone’s estimation—having been forced outwardly from within, and the noise of scurrying feet and angry, livid voices filled the doorway and the galleries beyond it. Meanwhile, Cleophus, the nigger crack head, who up to this point had been conspicuously absent, came running out through the doorway with a humongous super-expensive high-definition flat-screen plasma television set and a queerly mephistophelean smile-like grimace linking both his hoary ears with a grotesque chain of broken yellowing teeth.
  “Get the hell outta here!” Cleophus warned. “Some of them motherscratchers gots them some shooting-ass guns and—boy howdy—is them all pissed off as all hell!”