Sometimes I picture Ashley in his grave; wonder whether his skin is still smooth, his eyes still blue or long since decayed. I wonder about his last moments, whether he knew the heroin was a lethal cut when he cooked it down, if he was alone when he tightened the leather belt around his bicep; plunged the needle into his vein. He had that kind of strength where the muscles are round but not hard, and because they werent developed by fistfights or weightlifting, but by skateboarding and play, they were soft. When I think of the needle puncturing his skin, I picture it piercing through layers his baby fat, the emerging muscles of a man heroin and quinine like magma in reverse, burning through his insides and creating new islands somewhere deep. I think I always knew we never had a chance, and maybe that was part of the attraction.
You can either use a spoon or cut the bottom off a soda can. What youre looking for is a concave surface, something to dissolve the heroin in. Silver can tarnish, and when it does silver oxide contaminates your gear a dirty hit so avoid it if you can. If you get that in your blood, you wont forget it. Your teeth will chatter like its eighty below zero, even as your insides burn, and youll throw up so hard youll swear your stomach was about to come up with the bile. Clean your spoon with an alcohol swab. Take the chunks out of their bag and smell them make sure they smell right a little like vinegar, with a little sweetness, too. After a while, you can tell different cuts by scent alone, just like flowers. It makes sense. Even after the cutting, the boiling down, the filtering, and the mixing with other chemicals and powders, heroin is still made from the poppy flower.
Place a chunk in the spoon, crush it, and add water, using the syringe to measure 50-75 units. Heat until its dissolved. Use the plunger from your syringe to mix it. Roll a cotton wad or use a piece of a tampon and stick it in the spoon. Then stick the syringe in the cotton and pull the plunger back slowly. This filters out particles you dont want getting in your blood. Dont hurry when you stick the needle in. Its when the needle first pokes your skin that you feel the best. The anticipation is its own kind of peace whats inside that syringe will soon be inside you: potential energy on the verge of kinetic. Youre holding potential in your hand.
and if we existed as anything, it was as a kind of potential . . .
Sometimes we let our hands hover just barely above shoulders or clavicles or cheekbones, like air surveyors mapping mountains and caves, sending out signals that bounced back as radar in the darkness. Our fingertips flushed hot, the air between us magnetic and charged - potential energy on the verge of kinetic - but we resisted the attraction, refusing to touch so we could revel in longing a few moments more. We could have drawn intimate maps from those studies, but even still, I never saw his needle tracks.