Relapsed

Well, it was done. We'd all relapsed.

It wasn't as great as we'd expected.

I, myself, was having a pretty good time. The world had become ethereal, as it usually does when one is ripped on strong opiates. A whole new spectrum of vibrant colours revealed themselves to me (well - not new colours, per se, but colours I hadn't seen in a few months.)

Each person who sauntered past me would radiate with a sense of potential friendship, leading me to offer everyone my heartfelt greetings. Life had become worth living again!

Scrib, on the other hand, had receded so far into the interior monologues of his mind that it was impossible to get a word out of him. Questions would pass right through his brain as it twisted and turned, contemplating the sadistic inner workings of reality. There was a lot going on in there.

Fernweh, while not quite as reclusive as Scrib, had succumbed to one of the most prominent adverse effects of heroin - the Bothers.

Everything was bothering him - each sentence I spoke irked him, each misplaced shrub in the grass enraged him, the sound of the footsteps of passers-by infuriated him.

Thus, each word that he spoke was confrontational - whether it be to contradict what I'd just said, or to hate on something, or to talk down on someone. The Bothers always make for some truly lame social situations, where beneficial conversation is replaced by a competition between two egos.

People using heroin often find themselves vehemently arguing with each other, too busy thinking about how awesome they feel to realize they're both defending the same topic.

Snooze was extremely dissatisfied with our choice of relapse. We chose not to care - we sure as hell hadn't pushed the drugs on her, and it's not like we'd turned into psychopathic demons who weren't fun to be around.

Sure, Fernweh was grumpy, and Scrib was lazy and quiet, but that wasn't really much different than usual. Besides, I was having a great time with Snooze.

After I flailed around in the park for another half hour, our hobo bones began to creak. This is a telltale sign that something was coming... something... big. Something... wet...

We looked upwards and saw an army of storm clouds marching across the firmament. We hopped up, grabbed our bags and dashed towards the clouds and our destination: the Spadina bridge, where I'd slept last year on my journey through Toronto.

We'd beat the storm.

We had to!

Relapse (1)

Alright, well, a few things had happened since we'd landed in Toronto.

First, we realized how infinitely glad we were to be at least a few miles away from Habeeb's ignorance. The instant his car had pulled out of the parking lot he'd left us in, we muttered a few insincere thanks before hootin' and hollerin' as he crept out of the parking lot at his usual speed of 2 clicks an hour.

The second thing that happened was that I saw my old heroin dealer. Fuck. His stocky, pale, ogrish form ripped up to us on his skateboard before we'd even had a chance to find the person we were looking for in Toronto.

Ogre is actually a really cool guy. Despite this, I hadn't been making a point of seeing him while I was here. Last year, traveling with a group of traincore oogles had gotten me into some extra sticky situations with heroin. Needless to say, I wasn't too eager to reinstate an addiction like that.

Pft. Who was I kidding?

 I opened the filing cabinet that categorized my life;

sidling through the different years that each folder held.

I pulled out my past memories

and sent them through a shredder;

I found my failed dreams,

stapled them together,

and mailed them back to who I used to be.

Once I'd cleared out the empty folders,

I found myself at rock bottom again.

The three of us handed him over a wad of cash and waited for him to return. (I know that the number one rule on the streets is not to give money to dealers and let them run off, but I'd known Ogre for some good time and knew he was a solid guy. Aside from the first impression that any dope dealer gives off, he's an intensely spiritual, verbally talented sympathizer. He just happens to make his profit off of other people's lives.)

Didgeridouchebags

Anyway, we clunked down on the sidewalk and jammed out on our didgeridoos while we waited for Ogre and Snooze to show up.

Ah - Snooze. Last time I'd seen Snooze had been back in B.C.

Me and some of my old friends had introduced Snooze to Scrib and she'd fallen head over feels into a boiling vat of infatuation. Seriously - I'd never seen anyone fall so severely in love, so quickly. Despite our constantly hanging out together, she isolated herself from our group so she could ogle Scrib. Our words were lost on her; her words ceased to exist - her entire existence was revolving around putting Scrib under the scrutiny of a glossy-eyed stare.

Anyway, I'd hoped that her relentless lust (relentlust?) would diminish at least a bit between then and now, but it hadn't. She'd spent the first week apart sending me text messages demanding to know about Scrib's safety, and when it got so severe that I had no choice but to ignore them, she began calling me with the sound of tears in her voice demanding to know if Scrib had died.

Yeah. One of those relationships! Anyway, things hadn't changed. She offered Fernweh and I a quick hug before she threw her arms and her eyes onto Scrib and refused to let go of him until Ogre returned with our drugs. Right - the drugs. We had some explaining to do with Snooze...

Freedom from Habeebdom

Almost... there...

Almost...

There...

Habeeb's presence had become a suffocating grip that threatened to ensnare each one of us. Not only that, but we were getting irritated at ourselves for getting so irritated with Habeeb.

Fernweh, having dealt with Habeeb's unreasonable demands as much as we had

("you can't wave to strangers on the road!" 

"why not? they waved to us... this is a perfectly rational and friendly greeting, man."

"no! you can not do that!"

"fuck you..." )  

had just spilled a glass of water on himself, and finally flipped. He'd spent the next 3 hours muttering profane curses and death threats to the back of Habeeb's seat. Scrib's knees were driving him into a state of wretched agony, and his grunts and grimaces were sucking the sympathy out of each of our sickened souls.

The excited demeanor with which we'd left Vancouver was quickly dwindling.

Finally, after one of the worst six hours in recorded rideshare history (that anyone lived to speak of), the highway began to twist itself into a network of spiraling highways, an endless current of on-ramps and offramps.

We were coming into the city, at last, and we'd be freed from Habeeb's grumbling presence and our own cynicism that he'd unearthed from within. We'd be freed from a mire of fetid foot-stench. We'd be freed from these daggers that so diligently stabbed at our thighs.

We'd be free!

sometimes, life's like a fable;

each frown gives way to a smile;

upside down lips melt into the brightness of day

and every grin

brings off the burden of sin.

Super-Habeeb: Volume II

7 AM rolled around and we packed up our shit and went to meet Habeeb at the McDonald's where we'd promised. The next two hours passed in a stagnant swash of ambivalence.

7:30 - Habeeb hadn't shown up. This was to be expected - at the speed that he drives, I wouldn't expect him to be any less than an hour late.

8:00 - One hour late. We didn't actually expect him to take this long, but we weren't surprised.

8:30 - What the fuck, man. We were starting to weigh the pros and the cons of the potential situation. If he didn't show up, we'd have to hitchhike from Kenora to Toronto throughout the forlorn highways of Ontario. On the bright side - no more Habeeb!

We were considering calling someone to report his license plate number and have him tracked down, since he still had some of our stuff in his car. Between 8:30 and 9 he finally showed up. He bought us each an Egg McMuffin, presumably as an apology gift for leaving us sitting in McDonalds for 2 hours waiting for him.

Once we'd crammed back into his car, bent at unsightly angles and crushed by unnecessary amounts of our own gear, we witnessed another episode of Habeeb Driving. I swear, he was trying to follow his GPS out of the damn parking lot, because he ended up doing a bunch of half-circles around other people's parked vehicles at a max speed of 5kmph. I vowed never to let him park his car again before he let us out in Toronto.

We'd only driven for about half an hour before we saw the all-too-familiar red and blue flashing lights shining throughout the car's interior. Beebs pulled over and rolled down the windshield.

"Your insurance is expired, sir."

Idiot! You don't take a bunch of kids on a rideshare without letting them know that your insurance is expired. Granted, maybe we should have checked, but paying $180 for a ride generally guarantees the assumption that it will at least be legal. 

We were convinced at this point that Beebs was going to have his car impounded and that either the 4 of us would have to hitchhike out of here, or that Beebs would get a ride to the impound lot and the 3 husbands would be stuck hitching. It was bound to be an excellent couple days, foodless and drinkless as we were, cast under the vicious beat of the sun.

Nonetheless, after the cop made a blatant point of assuming Scrib was a criminal by singling him out and asking for his ID, we were set free.

At least he took us to see this.

 

Later on, when the sun had begun to set, we were pulled over again. Apparently Beeb's headlight was blown out. Fuck, man. We pulled over in the next city to rest until the sun came up, so as not to get busted again.

Beebs passed out pretty quickly once we'd found our parking spot. Understandable, since he didn't have pounds of baggage crammed onto his lap. It took Scrib and Fernweh a while longer, and I wasn't even able to fall asleep - though I was able to bare witness to Beebs being an idiot, even after we'd all relaxed.

During Fernweh's slumber, he moved his cramped knee and bumped it into the guitar. The slight jarring of the strings awoke Habeeb and sent him straight into an outrage.

"DO you not SEE that I am SLEEPING?" he hissed; the car turned from a calm, collected, and uncomfortable stupor into a spit-filled growl-haunted chamber, if only for a moment.

I considered stabbing Beebs and taking his car, but decided against it because I don't have a driver's license. Whatever. One more day, stuck in this car, and we'd be there...

The Bottle Pops (poetic stance)

Find some duct tape, man.
Sew shut the segregated synapses in your brain;
unify the array - quick!
Each neuron's a shingle,
covering the roof of your mind,
and they're being blown away
in a whirlwind that roars with animosity.

Every home deteriorates, yes,
but you had seemed ineffably constructed;
the thoughts that caulked your consciousness
so perfectly placed.

Yes, every mind will sag;
ceilings collapse
like cerebrums will lapse;
but you can't hire someone
to fix your leaking skull;
you can't find someone to re-shingle your smarts.

You're your own foreman,
distracted by low wages
output from your own mouth;
and high taxes on the price of your spirit.

The only one to rebuild you is you.

Is it a bird? A plane? It's SUPER-HABEEB

Habeeb left us in a flurry of badly confused miscommunication and a sense of awe at how dependent he was on technology. Never have I seen someone so reliant on a malfunctioning (or a functioning one, for that matter) GPS. Maybe he had doubts about his own intelligence, maybe he'd gotten himself lost a dozen times, I didn't know - all I knew is that I was getting pissed off.

We had been driving around in a circle for twenty minutes now as Habeeb's GPS system got him stuck in a loop. The road we were on went around a small suburban block, and we drove around it so many times that I was half-close to ripping Habeeb's head off. Did he even look at the fucking road? Habeeb, we can SEE THE HIGHWAY FROM HERE. IT'S RIGHT OVER THERE. TAKE A RIGHT.

"Oh, no, no. GPS says take a left."

"We've taken this road three times already." Silence. We drove around the road again.

Finally Beebs looked up from his goddamn GPS and realized that we could, actually, see the highway from where we were. He took the right and we ended up back on the #1 highway.

The sun had already set and a star-speckled firmament grinned down at us. We were going to be sleeping outside tonight, and it looked like a great night to do it.

Habeeb pulled into a motel to book himself a room. Before stepping out of his car, he made sure to usher us all out of the backseats - in the midst, juggling guitars and backpacks like street performers - and instructed us to go hide behind a building. He didn't want the motel attendant to think that he was going to be sneaking 3 additional people into the motel room - as if making a huge scene and sending us dashing from his car to hide ourselves made things less conspicuous. Fuck, Beebs.

Once that was settled, he crammed us back into his car and dumped us off downtown. I'm sure we'd been bothering him as much as he'd been bothering us (our fetid feet and snide remarks will do that), so it was nice to get some time to ourselves. Aside from the tense atmosphere in the car, the air itself had grown muggy and disgusting. It was nice to be away from Beebs and under the stars.

He dropped us off at a Boston Pizza - right next to the dumpster. Perfect. Once he'd reversed out of the parking lot (slower than anyone should ever reverse out of a parking lot - I didn't know cars could drive less  than 1mph, but he was pulling out at a tenth of that speed), we dove into the dumpster. We were tossing old pizza boxes around inside when the store's manager came out and gawked at us.

"Are you... in that dumpster?" he asked, completely incredulous.

Scrib poked his head out of the dumpster. The question was stupid, the answer was obvious, so Scrib only chose to mock the idiot. "Do your eyes often deceive you?"

The manager contemplated Scrib's statement for a moment before he realized how dumb he'd sounded. Still, he used his power of authority to ensure he came out on the top of this situation.

After we got kicked out, we made our way to the back of a convenience store. There was an electrical outlet there, so me and Scrib plugged in our phones. Fernweh and I crawled into our sleeping bags and settled down onto our nice, spongy-soft concrete mattresses, while Scrib stared deeply into the depths of my phone. His gaze was locked with great intent on the screen as he immersed himself in a world of video games. The 32-bit music serenaded me as the night drifted on and the moon gave way to the following morning.

Tonight, we'd be in Toronto!