The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

ziploc bags. What sandwich is going to fit in one of those?
    â€œAll of my boyfriends are either dead or in jail,” she informed me as she crushed out a line of coke on the lid of the tank in the back of the toilet. As soon as I snorted it, my nose began burning, followed by my eyes, which welled with tears. Her drugs were definitely cut with speed or glass or Pop Rocks or something. As I sat there reeling from the alcohol and bad drugs, she grabbed my face and started making out with me, covering me with incriminating glitter. My pants were half off and she pulled on my flaccid cock. I wasn’t thinking about getting caught anymore: All I could think about was urine. I seemed to have inhaled some, because it was all I could smell, and I still had to pee. The stench filled my head and permeated my body. I felt like I was going to vomit. I thrust my hand down her pants and violently yanked the ring on the hood of her clitoris, making her yell in pain, surprise or delight. Then I thrust my thumb inside her, bending my middle finger around her and ramming it up her asshole. “Why am I doing this?” I thought to myself. I wasn’t trying to turn her or myself on. I was just trying to be dirty. The situation seemed to call for it. I could have just as easily stuck my hand in a garbage can and accomplished the same thing.
    I pulled my fingers out as quickly as I had inserted them, urinated and left the bathroom to find Missi. But she had left, no doubt stormed off in a rage, leaving me stuck with the disco queen and so pissed at Missi that I was determined to plunge deeper into the sordid trench I had begun digging for myself. As I was asking if anyone knew where Missi had gone, a short, fat girl with a bag of stomach flesh hanging over her too-tight jeans and a white tank top dampened from sweat, revealing saggy, bra-less breasts, walked directly up to me, thrust her face inches away from mine and just stared at me.

    M ISSI AND ME
    â€œWhat?” I asked, annoyed and uncomfortable.
    She responded by throwing her drink in my face—not just the liquid, but the glass as well. I whipped my bottle of beer at her, and soon I was covered with hands trying to restrain me and pull me out of the bar. She followed me out and began yelling something unintelligible, most likely a reference to me selling out or sucking or being too cool for her. She seemed to be suffering from some delusion that her existence was important enough for me to pretend not to acknowledge it.
    With the disco ball still rolling along behind me, I ran drunkenly and dizzyingly into a nearby alley alongside a large white Spanish church and hid in the corner. A house of worship was probably the last place the cops would look for me. I had stuck the ziploc bag in my compact, so I brought it out and we snorted a few bumps off my house keys. I don’t know why I did more of that girl’s coke other than the fact that it was there. But as soon as I did, I regretted it. My heart began to feel like it was going to explode. I ran away, leaving the girl behind like the decade she seemed to belong to, and hailed a cab. The driver, a white ox in a wife beater with a big brown mustache and greasy hair, instantly struck up a conversation.
    â€œHave you ever seen Planet of the Apes ?” he asked. “Isn’t this just like Planet of the Apes ? All these fucking niggers everywhere.”
    â€œWhat the fuck are you talking about?”
    â€œWell, look around you.”
    â€œThe South can be so charming,” I said with an air of disgust, evidently visible to him.
    â€œAre you a queer or something?” he fired back maliciously.
    I don’t remember exactly what I said next, but no doubt it contained one of the following—“fuck off,” “asshole” or “suck my dick”—because he screeched to a halt in the middle of the street, smashed his hairy monkey fist into me through the divider and told me to get the fuck out of his cab.
    As I walked the quarter mile left to my house with a bloody nose and a pounding head and heart, a combination of bad drugs and a good punch, all I could think of was Charlton Heston saying, “Get your dirty paws off me, you filthy ape.” When I opened my front door, all hell broke loose. My records were strewn all over the apartment and the tops of them were scratched, courtesy of Polly, Missi’s white cat, which looked exactly like the familiar that