Moved from Other Fiction. Any critiques?
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Super Champion Funzone
I almost felt the needle pinching into my arm, filling me up with sweet delicacies, chilling my veins like liquid nitrogen. Even after recovered from the worst of the physical withdrawals, I could still taste the brown sugar on the tip of my tongue. I closed my eyes, licked my teeth, and smacked my lips, trying to remember that feeling, half hoping that my recollections would curb my hunger.
If you met the love of your life, would you let her go so easily? My honey was a seductive temptress. Oh, I missed her so. From the dark, cold cave of New York City, in which I dwelled, my beloved lifted me from the shadows and into the warm fields of the sun. She was mine, and I was hers.
But the sun was gone. I was now back in the monochrome cave in the Bronx with sterile benches, icy chrome stools, black windows, blinking florescent lights, high-pitched buzzes and shrills from flat-faced machines, starched sheets that choked you, locked doors, and stony-faced men in white with latex hands. Those rehabilitation doctors and narcotic psychiatrists declared that they weren’t done with me, that I still had “a severe psychological dependence on diacetylmorphine,” that I must remain in the sterilized prison.
The word “prison” made my stomach bubble. As I lied in my cold hospital bed, I looked around my white, windowless room. The synthetic electrical lights flooded my face from above, making my eyes tear up. I turned my head to the left to glare at the machine with wires coming out of it like Medusa. It beeped.
“Shut up,” I said to it.
On the right side of my bed rested a metal stand hoisting up a plastic IV bag in the air. There’s a tube connected to it. I followed it with my eyes. It spiraled downwards, and ended with a needle taped into my arm.
Wait, what the hell happened to my arm?
“My God, my skin is grey!”
Tears flowed down my cheeks and fell on the stiff sheets. The bastards gave me a skin transplant, I didn’t want that!
I sobbed and gazed at the machine on my left. “Please, I want my body back, this one doesn’t feel good.”
It only beeped.
I reached over with my left hand and removed the needle from my pale arm. I brought the metal sliver towards my lips and licked it.
I threw it on the ground. “It tastes like shit!” I pushed the metal IV stand down and it crashed into the wall, spilling poison.
The machine beeped.
I whipped my head around to my left. “Stop mocking me!” I shrieked.
I shoved it and it fell to the floor, but it still beeped. I jumped from my bed and beat it with the IV stand, smashing it in. “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”
The white men with fake hands rushed into the room and tackled me onto the bed, pinning me down.
I kicked, screamed, and spat. “I want my skin back! I want my skin back!”
I felt a pinch in my arm. I stopped and they piled on top of me. Is my honey back? I got drowsy, too drowsy to frown. Who is this bitch? Who are you? You’re not my darling.
I would’ve slapped her like a man, but I passed out and dreamed like a damn fool.
* * *
I was buckled into the passenger’s seat of a sixties Jaguar roadster, speeding in New York at midnight. The driver beside me hunched over the steering wheel, eyes focused on the road ahead. The only thing going through my sloshing head then was, how the hell are we cruising so fast in the city?
“Hola amigo, I’m Mark Moriarty and I’m your support counselor for this evening,” said the man while chewing gum and drumming the steering wheel with his finger tips.
He was a short guy, had kind of a semi-afro (almost Jew-like but a bit fuller) and a stubble of a beard, sort of a stylish, dirty look. All those were under a red snowboarder’s beanie, a striped collared shirt, chino pants with suspenders, and pink Adidas tennis shoes. Weird but hip, far out but funny.
He flared his nostrils and clicked his tongue. “Let me tell you a little bit about myself, compinche.” He turned his head slightly towards me. “I was born in sixty-nine, went to Berkeley for psychology in eighty-two, learned to paint in seventy-six, and tried every kind of hallucinogen I could get my hands on.”
He chuckled. “Man, college was one big trip.”
We reached the Brooklyn Bridge, and he sped up, carving and weaving through traffic, towards the island.
I gripped the sides of my seat. I looked at him, “Please, slow—”
“My parents weren’t too happy about it, though, when the Berkeley administrators called them up. As punishment, my parents pulled my college funds and I was forced to drop out.” He wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “So you know what I did?” He looked at my face now, right into my eyes. “I smoked a bunch of Salvia and sold all of my parents’ furniture.”
He leaned back and went into a laughing fit. I saw the rear bumper of the car in front of us get dangerously close, incredibly fast. Then at the last minute, Mark whipped us around and passed him, while wiping the tears off the corners of his eyes.
“But I took too much of that shit that day, it totally fucked me up. And now, I’m officially diagnosed with acute schizophrenia.”
We sat there in the car for a while, not saying anything, until he spontaneously bounced in his seat and slapped my knee.
“Come on, cheer up” he said, “we’re on the streets. Look at it!”
I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to see. I felt my stomach fizz and slosh as this lunatic accelerated us towards the caverns of Brooklyn. The cold, smoggy air chilled my bones and choked me. I thought of sweet, honeyed tea.
“I want the pain to go away,” I whispered.
“Hey amigo, rock and roll is the answer. I know what you need, and I’m gonna give you what you need.”
He sped up even more and switched on the radio. The Animals were playing House of the Rising Sun. My abdomen bubbled and burned my throat.
“Please—”
He stuck his head out into the wind and howled as we zoomed through the black streets.
My arm was hungry. It needed sugar. I scratched it. My blood became itchy. I scratched all over. It felt like I got a blood transfusion with poison oak.
“My veins are on fire, Mark,” I cried.
“Isn’t the world fun?” he asked with his fro whipping in the air.
I tucked my knees up to my chest and wrapped my arms around my shins. We cruised under the shadows of Brooklyn skyscrapers, which towered above like Grim Reaper statues.
“This is so gnarly,” he yelled. He poked his head out the window, and screamed at the top of his lungs, “Gnar gnar!”
What’s so gnarly about this cold, hateful slum of a town? What’s so gnarly about my boiling skin?
“Mark,” I gasped, “my skin, it hurts! My bones—make it stop.”
“Just scream, man,” he yelled over the whistling wind. “If you shout loud enough, you’ll scare ‘em away.”
With trembling fingers, I rolled down my window. I looked out and saw that we’re entering bright and beautiful Time Square.
My God, it was gnar gnar.
“Gnar gnar!” I yelled at the pedestrians on the sidewalks.
“Gnar gnar!” I roared in the Jaguar illuminated by flashing neon lights.
“Gnar gnar!” I howled into the vast New York night.
We hollered across Brooklyn, laughed through Harlem, and wailed past the Bronx. As we crossed over to New Jersey, the sun rose behind us, warming our backs.
“Feeling better, amigo?” Mark asked.
I turned my head to the afro man in the driver’s seat. “Hell yeah, Mark.”
I lifted my arms and bathed in the healing rays of the rising sun.
* * *
I owe my life to Mark Moriarty. It was because of him that I became a rehab counselor myself. He showed me the way out of the horrible cave dope locked me in, and convinced me that there is a sun in the world. He taught me how to enjoy the life instead of those small habits, to be high on life and not dope, that life is a super champion funzone. If I got off it, you can get off the crack, and this rehab center will finally let you on your way.
That’s it, that’s some really deep shit, yo. Enjoy your life, that’s what I’m saying. Bye, bye, I’ll see you tomorrow!
-end-
*Inspired by the Fourstar video and Kerouac's On the Road
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