Read Online Will Work for Drugs by Lydia Lunch - Free Book Online Page A

scars on his arm just weren’t healing right and more talk of amputation since he couldn’t afford the antibiotics after getting kicked out of first the Palace Hotel above CBGB’s and then the men’s shelter on 4th Street when they found out he had AIDS, so it was back to sleeping on the Bowery which was way worse than Bellevue because at least there you could steal chump change from the other inmates. But in no way was it as bad as being sent to Rikers when he got busted for selling methadone on the corner of 2nd Street and Avenue B, since he had the misfortune of running into the same Puerto Rican fags he puked on at the piers who proceeded to gang-rape him with a crusty Coke bottle requiring twenty-four stitches to close the festering wound. But he was released immediately after surgery and even managed to pick up a trick or two on the way back to the city.
    And I’m swallowing this all down staring into his beautiful bloodshot blue eyes and finally gather up the guts to ask him what’s taking so long. What’s taking so fucking long? What’s he holding back for? What is it he’s holding on for, holding on to? How many more times does he want to go through this? Does he want to put me through this? How much longer can he show off by showing up with the next murderous dose of no-good-news? How many more daily disasters? How much more devastation, degeneration, can he put himself through? What’s he waiting for? Xmas, Easter, his birthday … ? Why doesn’t he just fucking snuff it … go for broke? Why break it up in little pieces? I know he’s got it in him … It ain’t like he ain’t got the gall or the balls … or that he hasn’t been trying to fucking kill himself for every single day since ten years before I even met him …
    And he looks up at me all watery and wounded and says, “It’s because I’m scared. I’m scared …” Scared that when he passes on he’ll be called up on all the false starts and half-assed attempts and that he’ll have to stand in line with his pants down around his ankles and show the world that he was just another picture postcard depiction of a professional loser, all the markings of a two-bit gambler, a petty thief, a hustler, a cheat, a nobody … It’s nothing he’s got any control of … I mean, it doesn’t control him … It’s not that he’s a victim … It’s just something that he can’t seem to master that wants to master him … That seems to master mistakes and disillusion and dementia and, like an addiction to adrenaline, it keeps forcing him to draw and cross that thin blue line dividing reality from insanity … safety from harm, right from wrong again. And c’mon! Any idiot can spit in the eye of the Devil, but few are brave enough to get down on all fours and tongue that fiery hole … And he’s calling out to me that maybe I don’t understand. Maybe I just don’t understand. How could anybody understand? It’s just a classic case of wrong place, wrong time, right guy.
    And the next time I see him he might just be smiling, yeah! Smiling on a mountain top counting the corpses of all the young and old alike who didn’t know that when the time is right there’ll be no time left for whining, for crying, for self-pity. No time left for any more big fights or fuck-ups or handouts. No more corrosive sensation in the limbs, no more muscles as if twisted and being torn, then laid open, bare. No more brittle feeling of being made of glass, no more wincing or cringing at any quick movement or sound. No more unconscious incoherence of steps, of gestures. No more overwhelming central fatigue. And “I’m holding it together by sheer willpower. Holding it all together by sheer willpower!” He was trying to create a void so that I could progress. He was offering the expanse of an impossible space