Superior Ave. (The Fall of Thomas)

Superior  Ave.   







Sooner or later we all have to grow up.  It's an unavoidable fact, as sure as the dope will always run out, as sure as the friends will run out soon after.  We all reach a point where our innocent childhood comes to an end.  The protection of the parental wing withers by the checkbook and the strings of control fall from responsible hands.  From that point on we all step out on our own and shed that outer layer of fresh green skin.  There starts a new period where we are no longer inexperienced fools under a protective covering.  No longer do we have the safe hiding place, the umbilical cord.  No more is that which for all our lives we've taken for granted.  We are, for all intents naked.  Unguarded.  Unrestrained.  Unmonitored.  Free to fall to the depths of the furthest gutter, or rise to the heights of the most lavish penthouse.  Free are we to wear expensive suits and blow plastic cards over cash register counters, sliding a platinum credit grin to the waiter with an impressive finger making its way around the table, saying something suave like:

“Garçon, yes thank you.  Drinks all around please.  Gentlemen, order what you like.”

Trained are we to enjoy our comfortable perch, safely positioned at the top.  Natural it is to assume it will always be there.  On the ladder of superiority we climb over each other, step on heads and hands to secure our position, or to make the correct impression.  It is imperative the perch is maintained.  Our spot on top.  Or at least, if nothing else, our safe distance up the ladder.  It is what separates us from those who sleep on sidewalks with newspaper blankets.  It keeps us as the ones dropping generous coins, not the one holding the cup.  It makes the difference between king size mattresses, new silk sheets and seeping in the back seats of abandoned cars.

Is it simply the presence of a paycheck that keeps us from dragging tired feet around parking lots, begging up spare change?  If the paychecks were gone would we be reduced to dirty street people?  Is there no separation but a weekly inheritance of folding cash, between clean decent people like you and me and those bums?  How 'bout if we were a slave to a strict returning sickness, forcing us to come up with the money every morning for our medicine?  No exceptions.  No excuses.  How 'bout having to achieve $40-$50 each day to wake up properly, yes?  Sound like fun? With no legal income, with no precious paycheck, no bank account to draw from.  With bills crashing down around us, baby mommas bitching a critical tongue and our babies in bed, screaming... and this habit.  This greedy, filthy habit, more demanding than any other mouth in the house that needs fed.  What if we had no income to buy food for the mouths, what would we do then?  If the income was severed, the lifeline were cut.  What would we do?  Invest in a piece of cardboard and a black sharpie marker?  Some kind of shit about Will work for food, (but change is preferred.)  God Bless.

If no longer we could, with the push of a button, flip through gratuitous cable channels and pay for Chinese take out with folding money from our pocket, if the warm roof and plush carpet were yanked like a cloth on the table from under our feet, if our safety net deteriorated directly beneath our dangling socks... what in god's good name would we all do?  The perch must be maintained.

The perch must be maintained, yet the search is ingrained.  The hunger is second nature, feeding it is priority.  The need for much else other than the chemical savior sags to nothing.  That includes any and all perch maintenance.  And it's known by all that know, an unkempt perch shall surely fall with time's inescapable passing.  It is unavoidable.  In enough time, we all fall down.  So now with shed skin, it is time to move from that protective coating, keeping us safe as innocent newborns,  blind to our own ignorance.  Or own frailty, arrogance and vulnerability.  It is now time to step outside the comfort zone and experience what it is to truly be low.  With this northbound Greyhound pulling into the station, hugging up along a curb and spitting air from the breaks, kneeling like a Christian to let the passengers off, I was ready to find myself a new bottom.  One I had no idea I was on my way to.  One that, even though anybody else could have easily called it, I never saw coming.

I waited 'till most all other passengers left the bus, then I stood up and gave my seat a once over to make sure nothing had fallen from my pockets.  Both duffel bags were stored underneath the bus.  Locating them in the pile of stashed luggage, I slung one over each shoulder and made tracks with my shoes to the entrance door of Cleveland's Greyhound station.  I walked through and was met by a large room, packed to the teeth with travelers and luggage.  High ceilings and small children with runny noses.  Angry parents counting from one to three in threatening tones that kept their kids from crying.  Long embraces wrapped around loved one's shoulders as they stood on separate edges of good-bye.  The station was a madhouse of voices and confusion.  Lines everywhere.  Everyone had a line to be in.  I didn't.  An intercom blurted out  another departure time.

I pulled up an uncomfortable plastic chair on the edge of the confusion, only after walking the entire floor like the living dead with two large egg sacks on my back.  I dropped those two duffel bags down by an empty seat only after I'd scanned the last of the faces for the eyes of a tired old junky.          A man I've fought many battles against gravity with, the one I'd inadvertently just locked habits with.  A man I'd fallen to depths of depravity with, living in abandon downtown buildings, shooting dope by the light of portable kerosene heaters.  Cain Crowley.  Master of manipulating stories that spanned entire highs.  Cain Crowley.  They didn't measure his tongue in inches, they did it by the hour.  His was a face I'd not be able to miss.  It shot out in a crowd like a thousand black electric slugs into the people.  Turning them away at first glance.  Cain Crowley, dean of degenerates.  King of nowhere.  Liar extrordinaire.  From my seat I scanned the faces for his dope-soaked mug.  Nothing.

I hadn't seen him in quite some time.  He'd moved to Cleveland in search of new and exciting nods, in search of a larger pool of impressionable addicts he could mold himself around.  Cain had long ago escaped the returning dark days and nights of a bleak future in a smaller town where everybody knew his name.  He moved not long after introducing me to the needle, the habit and the hunger.  Since then we'd only kept in contact through he-saids and she-saids.  Last I spoke with him, he told me he'd be here at the station when my bus came in.  That happened about 16 minutes ago, Mr. Crowley was still nowhere in sight.

A kid was pulling on his mother's sleeve while she dug fingers into an orange bag of cheese curls.  Waiting on a Greyhound to roll silver wheels into the spot.  There were businesses men on the way to Akron, salesmen probably back from Jackson, offing black bibles in a Buick bought from Boston, all traipsing by with bags on wheels.  It was a challenge to keep my eyelids from mixing in with my drooping pupils.  I sat for another moment and snapped out of a nod, realizing he was probably in the bathroom.  So I stood up and slung a bag over each shoulder.  Everything I owned after 26 years of life was on my back.

Upon entering the tan tiled bathroom, even before the stink of piss had time to hit me in the face, wrinkling my nose like a shriveled sausage, Cain's string-bean  stature stepped laggardly through an opening bathroom stall door.  From his face fell the same blank expression that fell off mine, the vacant presence of dope in the blood stream.  A leather face, the  gray junk hue of an elephant's skin.  Black teeth like sludge from a lake bottom.  His eyes were greedy little pin holes.  Mr. Crowley looked like he could have fallen off any homeless bus on his way to the needle exchange.  It's how he came off at first glance.  Nobody much wanted to stare any longer than that.

When Cain approached the mirror I should have been surprised to see his reflection.  His face was an expression of excess, unshaven, thin and drawn in, like dirty water swirling down the drain.  It was a good representation of what I was in for, trying to stay clean in a town like this with a junky like that.  Hanging out with this cat, it shouldn't be long before I'm begging for change and smelling like a turd turner at the shit factory.  Crowley had obviously finished tying off on a new bruise, nodding out on the toilet while he was supposed to be meeting me in the lobby.  He let the stall door swing closed slowly behind him.  A man zipped his fly and took a second at the hand dryer.  More for show than anything else, just to let us all know who the civilized one was in the room.  Glossing over black hair and clean teeth as he batted eyes with the mirror.  When he left, we were the only two in the bathroom. 

“Fuck you been?” Cain sarcastically jumped in before I had a chance to, knowing damn well I'd been sitting with duffel bags at my feet for a good number of minutes, waiting for him.  Knowing damn well he'd been nodded out in the brown painted bathroom stall the whole time.  If I was a female it would have been legal recourse to act like a complete bitch the entire night and get away with it.  For being an inconsiderate bastard and making me wait.  Cock-eyed Crowley trumped me with a small wax paper fold full of brown powder which he figured would be the last thing mentioned on the subject.  It was.

I took the bag in my palm and wondered how I could have actually talked myself into believing that it would be any different.  It was too easy to lie to myself, to give in, procuring junk and pushing lines in the sand back to tomorrow.  Tomorrow.  I'll kick tomorrow.  Telling myself things would somehow end up differently, while keeping alive the same bad habits I'd fed the whole time.  I was a smart man.  Yet a thing like that slipped, untouched through my bullshit detector.  I had actually tricked myself to believe I would be on some kind of squeaky clean balance beam while living with the lowest of the low. 

And just like that, the desire to quit the habit became as fleeting as the passing wind off the ass of the burrito king.  Well... at least we were both on the same page, now.  Both on the dose, so there's no confusion as to the priorities.  In those days, there was something glorified  in the act of giving into temptation.  It just felt good.

“I don't think I need any more right now.  I'm pushing off when we get there.”  I said, slipping the baggie into my shirt pocket, apology accepted.

Cain's pupils were the pathetic dot of a gnats ass, tiny black spots in a deep brown iris.  Opiates shrink the pupils down to pinpoints.  It's a dead giveaway to any addict trying to pass as sober.  “You told me you had 3 months clean.”  He shot a blank look, the pang of sarcasm in his voice hinted he thought I'd been lying.

“Oh, yeah...”  I said, motioning to his fucked up grill, about to slide off his skull like a plate of old spaghetti into the trash.  “I seem to be doing about as well as you then.  How much clean time you got now?”  Crowley laughed a gap tooth grin, cowering behind the dope in his blood.  He reached out and relieved me of one of my duffel bags. 

“C'mon.”  He growled.  The bus we needed to be on left in less than a minute.  We made it on just as the driver was closing the doors.

I walked the isle of the relatively empty bus and found a seat.  Cain fell into one across from me and immediately closed his eyes, nodding off.  The busy streets of walking people, merging taxis and city noises were a welcome change from the desolate shade of gray and rust hopelessness that was Youngstown, Ohio.  I felt free in the grandeur of the tall Cleveland buildings, shooting lead fingers from the earth, trying to get a better view of lake Erie.  Tall buildings fascinate me.  The life of a city.  Hundreds of thousands of people all inhabiting a small area of land.  Interacting with each other; living out their own separate versions of this same life existence we all share.

The summer temperatures were record high sweat levels.  Sun rays shone through the city bus window, a new view of life to come.  There were countless possibilities to make money for the master.  Cain lay like a dead cat in the seat across the isle from me.  He had started snoring.  The guy came off as a fiend at first glance.  His every cell was junk constructed.  The very stuff oozed from Mr. Crowley's oily skin pores.  His heart, useless now for any kind of real compassion was left only to be used for mechanical purposes, pumping pure dirt, thick and chunky through his veins.  Mr. Crowley had a long tear under the arm pit of his coffee stained tee shirt.  It was too small and probably hadn't been washed since the shady side of last month.  Cain had reached a point of not caring so deeply, that I was now made to walk across town with the same caliber of those who lie on sidewalks.  A bunch I seem to connect with better than those who wear platinum and carry $1200 purses.

As I watched him lay, draped in the red bus seat across from me, I felt strange in this situation.  Doped up.  Broke with junky pride,  getting the same degenerate looks that crooked-chin Crowley was getting as he snored through his teeth.  I felt as if I was only temporarily living the life I'd led thus far.  The same sensation one gets watching a couple fight in a booth across the restaurant.  You know something is wrong but don't care since it's not your life.  I reached over and kicked Cain's foot.  He woke in slow motion, grazing a finger across his unshaven face.  I told him he was snoring.  His eyes began closing in the same motion as they had opened.  I could see his week attempt to grasp consciousness fade from view, so  I turned my head to face the window.

The bus was equipped with a sensor that announced upcoming stops over a loud speaker.  “4th & High”  cut through the humidity.  “That's us.”  Cain sat up from a dead state.  The subconscious opiate watchtower pulling him out of wherever he had been hiding.  “That's the stop we need, lets go.”

The bus curbed and we jumped off and covered the rest of the way on foot to Tower City's train station where we'd pay for a $1.50 ride to the Flats; a low lying section on the west end of downtown.  The land engulfing the mouth of the Cuyahoga river, the Cleveland Flats, are separated into two banks, east and west, where the river splits the land in two.

The east bank of the Flats used to be lined with long busy streets of bars, strip clubs and scattered signs of nightlife.  It was a haven for drunken frat boys and girls gone wild, slamming back Jager and shots of Jack.  I spent numerous nights in the Flats, swilling it down in bar rooms, catching shows at the Odean, paying outrageous cover charges at the Crazy Horse, killing braincells like I had them to spare.  I hear the area now has been shut down after somebody fell into the river and drowned.  Bunch other things, lawsuits, I would later learn.  Several things happened that probably will end up in the area being turned into condos.  But at this time, the Flats were a spot for copious amounts of alcohol, live music, nakedness and general late night debauchery.  The west bank was somewhat the same.  A little more laid back, lotta warehouses.  Nice restaurants.  Night life.  Nautica stage.

The train stopped and we got off.  There was a nicely landscaped slope with weaving paths cut into the grass.  Spitting fountain water jizzed in a decorative display where people gathered, sitting on benches.  The Cuyahoga River snaked by on a lazy push toward Lake Erie.  Under a the tall concrete legs of the Detroit-Superior Ave. bridge, skirting the river on  pebbled path we headed, then over a red drawbridge to the west bank. 

“The Cult's playing tonight.”  Cain said.  “We can watch it from the roof of my building.  It's right behind Nautica stage.”

The stage, later named Scene Pavilion, is an outside stage near the river.  It has since been covered to protect from weather with a large white fabric, looking like a mammoth misshapen marshmallow engulfing the streets at the bottom of the hill. (STREET NAME)  At the time however, the stage was open and faced the rear of the building Cain Crowley had nestled himself and his needles into.  From the roof was a secluded view of the stage and a small stack of bleachers where the crowd was assembling below.  Mr. Crowley threw rent dollars on this space down Riverbed St after his sister recently moved out and left him the place.  Corner of the building, three flights up with community bathrooms at the ends of the hall.  A loft space, nice and somewhat clean.  Not without downfall though, water from the pipes was undrinkable.  Drinking water had to be purchased in gallon jugs at a store about 3 blocks and a walk over the bridge away. 

The loft was roughly 60 x 40 with 16 foot ceilings.  An industrial space, just one large open room.  The walls were brick and painted a deep green.  Cain had sectioned off two sleeping areas by hanging long black fabrics from the ceiling, weighing them down by long wooden dowels sewn into the bottoms of the large swinging walls.  That left an off white utility sink, a counter and a whole lot of open space where gatherings of couches and chairs sat on wood floorboards.  Old brass standing ashtrays separated chairs and knee-high tables.  Brass doorknobs piled up on an oriental carpet, covering a portion of the dusty floor.  Cain walked me around the joint, pointing out this and that, layering his stories with more and more bullshit.

We made it to the far corner of the space.  An area was sectioned off by two swinging fabric walls and two outside brick walls.  It was a decent size for one person to call a bedroom.

“You'll be sleeping in here.  It's not much but that thing is comfortable, I slept on it for a year before getting something else.”  Mr. Crowley pointed to an oversize feather blanket on the floor.  “I'm in a freestanding hammock now, the hanging motion keeps me in tune with the earth.”  Cain jabbered, switching on a floor lamp carved from an unruly wriggling of drift wood. 

When he flicked on the dim light, my new sleeping quarters were illuminated.  The lamp was the only other thing in the room except for the dusty wood floor boards and a puffy black feather bed.  A bean bag without beans, a pillow overdoing it on growth hormones, engulfing me every time I would lay in it.  The lamp looked like a wretched hand, crippled with arthritis, holding a light-bulb and a lamp shade.  All walls swayed with the light breeze that blew in from the tall open warehouse windows.

“No, I'm for real Thomas.”  Cain reacted to my snicker when I'd assumed he was kidding.  “It's all about sleeping in a hammock, it's the only way I do it.  I hang there on a moment's notice.  Perfectly attuned with the universe.  I used to sleep on that.”  He pointed at the formless pocket of feathers on the floor.  “... but it fucked up my back.”

“Oh, so give it to me, right?”  I slapped back, setting my bags down by the black sway of my bedroom wall. “Let me fuck my back up.  I'm a be down there on the floor, in tune with a drafty chill.  Thanks.”  I was in a good mood, there was a bag in my pocket I was about to shoot, I was in a new city on a new clean slate with a concert about to start in my back yard.  Fuck yeah, I was in a good mood.

After settling in with the introduction of sleeping quarters, I walked into the main living area and sat in an old chair near a statue of some kind of angel holding a lamp post.  Antiques were Mr. Crowley's specialty, finding them in old warehouses and such places.  Some he sold for dope, some he saved for last.  Inevitably though, all things owned are those things waiting to be sold for the habit.  It's an unavoidable and predictable fact of any junkie's life.  Cain had a knack for being able to sniff out abandonment and milk it for all it could give.  It was his shining feature, of which he had few.

I sunk a needle tip under my skin and let the good times begin.


The show started in less than an hour, people were gathering around the stage holding positions down front, not wanting to move and lose the spot.  I wasn't necessarily a fan of the Cult, they had that one song... but, I don't know.  That night turned out to be a decent welcome into the city.  I was satisfied with my new digs.  Free rock and roll with a rooftop bird's eye.  And here's Thomas Frye on a fresh try to do something that probably looks a whole lot like nothing.  Feeling free and only having to worry about but feeling good.  Orange peel glow of a sun setting from a Cleveland sky.

It was a good night.

And there it was, I had made it.  The move was managed, the duffel bags were placed on the floor by what was my bed.  There was enough money in my pocket to survive a couple weeks.  And the rest of the night was mine to mope around and watch the sunset from Cain Crowley's warehouse roof.  With the golden hue of a sprawling summer sun, a red carpet of warmth, opening like god's arms to welcome me to Cleveland, I went to town on lighting a fresh Marlboro with a blue bic. The air, in a humid breeze off Lake Erie stroked my skin with a waining moisture.  I was elated, excited and felt free for the first time in a long time.  There was no paperwork to drown in, no forms to fill out.  I had no banks or mortgage companies to mince words with, no appointments to keep.  My schedule book was empty and useless.  Just like me.  There was nothing I was expected to do and nowhere I had to be.  I was, in essence, a school kidder, just being set free into that vast endless summer

I was, as I stood under the thunderous crash of music coming from the stage, for once at peace.  Gazing down over the people in the pit, moshing to the rhythm of wicked drums, I exhaled nicotine and second hand smoke from my lungs and watched the Cult rock it out with Monster Magnet, i believe.  Or maybe it was Monster Voodoo Machine.  I can't remember.
I was pretty high.







OOO







“Get used to this routine.  This is like a 7am thing.”  Cain said around 7am the next morning.  “I figure this will be a decent month since we both have money.”  He pulled the top off a red shoe box.  Inside was a thin rubber-banded stack of cash.  I stood above him, holding a fist full of my own twenty dollar bills.  “If we cool it and don't get greedy we should be able to keep well for a couple weeks at least.  I've got half the rent right here, plus your half...”  he said. 

I threw the wad of twenties in the box. 

Cain pulled a few twenties from the box and closed it, standing up like a man without balance.  He was balls deep in a story about something I wasn't listening to.  The dope was a separate box in his bedroom, a wooden box with red velvet lining inside.  It was all the way on the other side of the loft, in his sleeping section.  Cain kept talking louder as he walked farther, a shade from yelling by the time he was behind his hanging fabric wall.  I wondered why he couldn't stop talking long enough to grab the shit, picking his story back up when I was in earshot.  Like he was in danger of losing his place in line, having to begin his story all over again if he stopped for even one second.

He returned with another box, every syllable a steam roller as Cain flipped open the wooden top, reveling the blood red insides.  He removed a yellow rubber banded clump of  wax paper baggies.  A couple a piece.  I had a ritual to follow.  I had a char broiled spoon and an abscess forming if I wasn't careful.  I had a matchbook.  My blue bic ran out on my final cigarette last night.  Mine was the spoon set on the floor, bent in the shape of a serpent with a steel tongue. 

I had everything I needed to feel how I needed to feel.  The belt I was using was an arm wrapping of teethmarks and scratched leather.  I needed to feel its pull.  Ripping the top off the bag off with my teeth, I spit the corner onto the floor.  With 20 units of water squirted spoonwise, the brown pile of dope became brown liquid.  I flipped a small ball of cotton onto the steel beach and watched it expand like a toxic lung.  The dope was a decent cut.  It cooked down nicely in the spoon but felt even better in the vein.  After a pin prick and a bit lip, I slouched on the couch like there was nothing else in the world.

“Don't get comfortable.”  Cain piped up.  “We got a long walk ahead of us.  That's just to get us moving.  You can reimburse me for those bags out of your end of what we score for.  That was the last of my stash.”  Mr. Crowley had the ultimate score card in his head.  It never missed a hash mark and the score was always slanted towards him. 

Within minutes Cain was locking the apartment door behind him.  We stood in a long hallway of doors to spaces probably similar to ours.  A long wooden stairwell connected every floor in the building.  On an effortless stroll, I climbed it down to the ground floor and let bright screaming sunlight into the shadowed stairwell as we spilled out onto Riverbed St.  We set  foot to pavement          that day, as we did every grueling day that summer, without break from tradition.  We will cover this same exact walk under the demanding military command of an unforgiving sickness, in the early morning rays of a brooding hot sun.  We will put Puma to pavement with Cleveland's downtown section rising just to the left of view, just outside our building.  A fresh day, a comfortable high, a brand new summer.  Aaahhh, the good life. 

Ahead of me as I walked onto Riverbed St. from the apartment, was a small grassy slope into the Cuyahoga River.  A clean wooden boardwalk spanned the edge of the water.  I saw several places to sit and gather one's self.  Long benches and a wood covered gazebo adorned a new wooden deck.  The Detroit Superior Ave. bridge smacked you in the face upon exiting the building.  At night the bridge was lit to a bluish hue.  I usually was too.

I would spend many warm narcotic summer evenings, staring idly at that bridge.  Taking in the view of the night lit city skyline, expanding just beyond the reach of my dull and senseless fingers.  Doped to the teeth.  Lying in the grass, or on a long wood bench, skirting the riverbed.  In quiet genuflection of a tranquil moment.

The Cuyahoga river was crossed by a red drawbridge, Center St. bridge.  In the approaching months it would became a nuisance to tight train schedules and runny noses, slowly swinging out of the way to let boats and barges by.  A thorn in my sick side any morning I didn't have an extra 10 minutes to wait, when 10 minutes stretched for an hour.  There was a Center Street Bridge, 60 miles away in Youngstown that had become the breeding ground for many of my addictions as well.  That one never held me up.

“Aww, how cute a drawbridge.”  The voice, a girl's, came from behind us.  A couple had walked up hand in hand and were now standing about 7 feet away.  Mr. Crowley and I both turned around.  The girl was a petite mixture of muff diver and cheerleader.  It was obvious from everything that surrounded her she came from money.  Her boyfriend was as all American as coffee and cheeseburgers.  He sneered at Cain like a jock at the half time hot dog  stand.  “Oh look and we get to wait for it!  How cool.”  She was all excited in her blue tight fitting shirt.

I turned back and watched a flat boat float by full of crates, thinking how much it was going to suck when I hit this bridge on the wrong end of a slow moving barge and an impatient sickness.  Luckily now I was sedated foot marching on marshmallows and I didn't care.  The girl behind me to my left was all worked up over it.  She was holding onto her man like a life-rope over a lava pit.  Saying things like “Oh it's perfect, it's all so perfect.”  like maybe last night  was the first time she'd gone home with this fellow and he was walking her to her car, parked in a lot under the bridge on the other side of the river.  With the girl, of course making plans on where she was going to park her car when she moved in to his place, which drapes she was going to hang when she moved her sweater collection into his loft bedroom.  Him of course, just trying to get rid of her so he can never call her again.

I turned around again and made eye contact with the short blond haired ditz standing perched up on her high horse behind us.  She had been glaring at Cain with superiority that only money can buy.  The kind of look that says “don't talk to me, I'm above people like you.”  In her defense, Cain did look like he was about to ask her for spare change.  It was obvious as we all stood there, juxtaposed in positions of power and prestige to powerful powder and preppies; from jock to junky, how Mr. Crowley and myself were on one side and these two clean cut do-right lovers were most definitely on the other.  There was no other conversation needed.  I was quite sure the girl would be talking about us once we were far enough away.

After about 4 or 5 minutes, Center Street bridge was connected with the other side of the river and we were on our way over it.  Down along a stone path, of which there were many, snaking the sloping grassy beds lining portions of the east bank of the river, we marched in junk rhythms under pristine morning sunshine.  Then under the Detroit-Superior Ave. bridge, following it lengthwise as it shaded our path through several parking lots and up a small hill, cutting the bright sun out from our sensitive eyes.  It's tall concrete legs holding the bridge's traffic high overhead.  We cut across some grass circling a large fountain, up to layers of train tracks and over to Settlers Landing, the nearest train station.  Such was the beginning of many long desperate walks, that started underneath the Detroit Superior Bridge. 

The train pulled up shortly.  We purchased a ticket and took a seat.

The tracks snaked a short distance up and over the river on tall sets of raised railroad ties disappearing into the  blackness of a tunnel to the underground station beneath Tower City.  Like a large metal caterpillar, weaving with accordion grins along the shiny spine of the train tracks.  In the Tower City interchange, one could switch trains and directions without paying a fare.  We waited for our connecting ride, standing with backs against square pillars, on the edge of the tracks.  Waiting.  Waiting.  Waiting on a westbound.  When our train hit, we hopped on and took it to W. 65th & Madison.  It was a long hot walk across fields, down thin roads of stinking warehouse factories, east on Shorer Ave and north on W.52nd.

From this spot on West 52, it was a handshake and a Benjamen for a bundle of West side Puerto Rican skag that cooked down brown as a bad bowel movement. 

Cain fumbled with the 10 baggies of heroin, tightly wrapped with a rubber band.  “I know a place.”  His beat up beak was full of anticipation.  We backtracked a bit and shot the dope behind a W. 52nd St. dumpster.  There were several of them sectioned off from the rest of the world by an 8 foot privacy fence, in the back of a parking lot.  I figured from the litter on the pavement, other local junk heads made the spot their regular shooting grounds.  Orange caps lay only half under the dumpsters as if barely an attempt was made at kicking them out of view.  There were two milk crates back there that made for comfortable seats.

In those days I hid my dope in the back of a camera, behind the film to give me one last chance at talking my way out of a felony if caught.  My works, I hid in my sock.  I had a constant supply of water in the form of a small brown bottle with a water tight seal.  I kept it in my pocket, within reach at all times, as were all my supplies.

The W. 52nd St. dope was a good cut.  I'd be straight for another 3 or 4 hours. 

With enough dope to keep us straight for the day and night, we rode around town on slow trains and pushed tired shoes on sidewalks in the pre-noon sun.  Cain pointed out his frequent money making spots as I drew back on a soda pop from a corner shop.  With a dirty finger pointing at storefronts, he layered each leg of the directionless downtown stroll with endless stories how he was almost caught in this place, or how he made a killing over here returning a stolen watch he'd taken from a display case.  We made our lazy, aimless way through the city on return to the Riverbed St. apartment.  Mr. Crowley's was an intrusive demanding drawl, which stores had cameras and which parking lots gave money for the asking.  I could tel the first day in Cleveland, my habit was about to take a turn toward the dirt.

I thought about it as we climbed the stairs to Cain's loft, as I sat on an old beat up and reupholstered couch from the '1930's and while I scanned my eyes over his posh high ceilinged apartment.

“This is all going to take an unwelcome chunk out of our dope money.”  I thought.  “I'm surprised Cain had been  responsible  enough to pay the rent for the two months after his sister moved out.  This roof  isn't going to last.  I'm going to end up sleeping on a park bench next month ... I fucking know it.”

For the most part, I've always been able to come up with enough money to where I was never forced to wave a gun in someone's face.  My theft record yes, was lengthy but only existed to maintain a habit and mostly, when possible, was focused on boosting from hardware and grocery stores.  Not that this makes it right but I tried to procure my dope money from ripping off nameless faceless corporations.  A department store bandit, when need be, otherwise I was the driver... other than that I was self sufficient on a hefty paycheck.  The theft just filled in the blanks, where blanks appeared.  My perch has always remained somewhat maintained.  Sometimes the money earned was not enough but at least it was there.  At least there was something coming in.  Now, neither Cain nor myself had a job.  Which meant no paycheck, making perch preservation nearly impossible. 

This loft would sooner or later need to be paid for.  We would have to eat some time.  My needle hole addiction was a demanding master in itself, let alone all the coke I was expected to shoot.  The electric bill, food, drugs, rent... how were we going to pay for it all?  The logic wasn't there.  The math didn't make sense.  I couldn't see farther than one month in advance, since I knew for a god damn fact we were good for one month's rent and that was about it.

I'm sure one of us would talk about getting a job but that's about as far as that it will go.

It was official, my new living arrangement was going to be a lesson in homelessness.  It was written all over our empty rent check.  All  over the long hard black blue, swollen bruised and overused tract marks that lined Mr. Crowley's arms.  The ones he had to hide with long sleeves every sweaty summer morning we'd hit the streets.  As I sat on the antique couch with the drug on my back like a 50 pound ruck sac, the question still remained.  As I singed my fingers, nodding out with cigarettes burning in my clutches, the question was still the same.

Sooner or later the rent money will be dogfood money and then what would we do? 

  I've squatted in several abandoned warehouses in the past, sure.  Ones that Mr. Crowley acquired, somehow getting gas or electric turned on in his name.  I've been on the broke side of a pay period many times and yes, I've survived on very little for long periods.  Yeah, I made a decent buck in real estate but the money always disappeared too soon.  There's no escaping the rotten truth that no matter what, the habit still needs fed.  I've stretched things out to the last cent, talking big dreams, big plans over big piles of dope.  Sleeping in cold vehicles when a bed couldn't be found; strange couches and sometimes a secluded bench or bus stop.  Yet I had never been forced to swallow all that much pride, never really scraping gutters like they say one inevitably will on a heroin habit.

  Luckily, baring a few exceptions, I'm usually able to find a warm roof to at least sleep under for the night, even if I'm forced get up early the next morning when the owner of said roof leaves for work.  No matter what happened, I knew I always had the benefit of a hard work ethic to save myself from a debilitating and timely returning sickness... and enough friends that I wouldn't be caught out in the cold without a bed for the night.

I am a lost sock in the dryer, tumbling from top to bottom in furious circles, cycling from dead broke to doing well again.

I have scraped the dichotomous wheel of living the life of a bachelor steak eater, too lazy to cook steaks - to scraping bags of residue & empty pockets.  To scraping the streets.  To living back under the healthy vein of an honest paycheck, safe and sound again.  I have gone full circle from loads in the bank to bank overdraft notices.  From more money than I know what to do with, to wishing I had just $20 that I'd know exactly how to spend.  Nodding hours away underneath bridges downtown to shopping for expensive shirts, dressing the professional part, back to scraping bellies on the edge of having to call myself homeless again.  Hungry.  Dirty.  Shot up the rent check last Tuesday, now rent's due tomorrow.  Dopesick again, floating on a generous couch ride from a friend that's about to come to an end.  Back to safe and sound again.  Back under the veil of the healthy paycheck.

I'd done it for years.  Back and forth.  But this summer was the one that would break me into the reality of the life.

The real side of living on dope without a job.  Which turned out to be more of a full time job than any full time job I'd ever held.  Living out of a duffel bag on somebody's floor.  Some floor on some side of some strange town.  Some other floor a week later.  Hustling, scamming, lying, buying, selling, running from security, trading this for that, constantly moving, always waiting, come back in an hour he should by have something then.  Sitting in cold cars, jacking the last of the cocaine in a vein in the backseat.  Then running out of Radio Shack with stolen cameras that will yield another couple of grams.  Where we'll be good for another hour or so till we start to come down and we've got to hit another Radio Shack across town.

Round and round, head down and bottom bound.

Fuck, now that I think about it, this was the summer I spent 6 years, all in one night after taking several hits off a wet cigarette, dipped in formaldehyde.  Trying the whole time to get 10 bags of dope back that I'd been shorted earlier in the day.  I'll end up settling for only 8 out of those 10 bags, since is I'll be shermed to the distorted tune of embalming fluid, a very confusing and horrific trip. 

I don't ever suggest smoking cigarettes dipped in formaldehyde.

Anyway, life on the bottom.  Sooner or later you stop, get caught or drop dead.  Until then, nothing changes.

In fact if I had to be honest, through years of first-hand personal experience, I've come to believe there is no true bottom.  One does not exist.  There is always farther down a man can go on any self destructive path.  To eat when there is no food.  To smoke when the addiction calls.  To stay warm when the night air is cold and there is no roof.  To make the medicated moment last a little while longer, there is always lower a man can go.  To feed a growing hunger.  To survive.  To sustain, a man will do many things.  The bottom is nothing but a murky idea of the lowest one is willing to stoop.  A roundabout estimation.  Though that line in the sand can always be drawn an inch further back and usually is. 

And speaking of the bottom, while I nod out here on Cain Crowley's antique couch, let me reflect upon my own.  Not necessarily the lowest I've been... but pretty far down there.  Definitely at the time, the lowest I wanted to go.  My alleged bottom was a horrible morning on the downside of this particular summer I was in Cleveland.  I had crossed some line, when I didn't have money, when I was sick and desperate, I stooped to new lows.  Crawling around on skinned knees, below the wood deck platform at the 65th  & Madison train station.  Just spent the morning panhandling my pride away for a $5 handout.  Filthy.  A showerless week.  Dopesick beyond any excusable way of treating myself.  Searching the ground for a discarded cigarette to smoke.  One that someone may have lit when the train came, forcing them to short it out and flick it for me to later find and smoke with dirty fingernails. 

My tracts were long bruises, so I was wearing a ripped up sweatshirt that hasn't been washed in a long long time.  With holes in the side of the wrist cuffs where I pushed my thumbs through, covering my knuckles with a frayed fabric, I looked  like a complete street soaked bum when I extend my palm for shameless handouts.  It was one of the few articles of clothing I owned.  Unwashed and stinking of the street.  If I had to nail down a description of a bottom of mine, it would be that.  Broke, hungry, dopesick, begging for change, jonzing for a shot, stoned off of bad weed.  Paranoid.  Made the transition long ago from buying packs to smoking shorts found in public ashtrays & wondering where my next meal was going to come from.

It will be this summer that will transition me from a substantial earner, suit and tie motherfucker; going out there and making it happen, real respectable like... to face down at the ground, lost and found a new bottom rung.  From scraping my plate after a healthy steak dinner to scraping local parking lots with an excuse of an empty gas tank or a lost wallet.  Like a broken dog.  Broken by the habit, the sickness, the intensity of the want, the strength of the high and the fierce desperation of circumstance.  Broken down will, busted up self esteem with all my pride lost a long while ago.

  That's right.  Me, I, Thomas Frye, your faithful and dedicated narrator did yes, many times extend a hand, palm up to another for spare change.  Wandering pathetic sidewalks with no shame and a tongue like a word lasso, You got any change, hey, hey, you got any spare change?  Broken.  Head down to the ground.  In fact, I'm somewhat embarrassed to say          once our money ran dry, it took only three summer weeks, for me to fall from copping a superior attitude due to the fact I could rise before 7am and put in an honest day's work, to begging for change on the street to feed my habit.  Three fucking weeks.

So that was me... on the bottom, completely aware I was in a life lower than a dirt digging worm at the moment; smoking a ½ burnt Newport that was in someone else's mouth two days prior.  One which I'd found while crawling around the oily rocks that surrounded the wood and metal of the train tracks below the 65th and Madison platform where the civilized public stands to wait for their trains. 

Unlike me, regularly pushing fingers through public ashtray sand and the hard reality that there's probably urine stains on the filter, as I pick the cigarette from the ground and light it; pulling drags of stale smoke and desperate flavored nicotine fixes.  Just got done begging up $5 on my elusive search for a $10 bag.  Pacing around in a paranoid train station, getting brow beat downs from the locals, 12 times sicker than I'd need to be due to a poorly placed shot of cocaine.  Some kind of bottom for me.  Gotta be.  Or maybe just a random moment that sticks out from the days of bottomfeeding on Cleveland's east and west side streets, unaware that I was only about ½ way through my cumulative lifetime tenure to junk. 

Years and years to fall lower, thinking I was about as far gone as I could get; pacing around that nervous train station,
smoking that discarded piss stained cigarette.  Although I can't necessarily say I never got low down and dirtier than that,
It's a goddamn fact that it was a sick stack of days upon weeks and months that would add this summer into the running for the worst display of unshaven, holey sweatshirt wearing, crippled pride change begging, street stealing, dirty pie fingernails I'd have for many years.






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