Thread: Travelling Light

I met Nathan one late blue night when I was walking around Union Square.
A two man band was playing to his left, Nathan singing harmoniously off-pitch with the music.
“Tonight I got drunk and I got laid in… in an alley way,” he yelled.

After a minute of repeating this, one of the band members, who was on the banjo, got tired, and told the guitarist it was getting late, that it was time to go. They left Nathan singing alone. He was wearing a lopsided grin.

I came up to him.

“What drugs did you take tonight?” I asked, curious.

“Just booze man… hey I just had sex with some black chick in an alleyway man!”

I told him to explain. So he told me how it happened, how he got lucky tonight. Apparently, while riding the subway, Nathan had to urinate badly. He had gotten off next stop to find a decent piss corner.

Finding a crevasse in an old building, Nathan completed his mission.

He proceeded to turn the corner, finding two women smoking outside a back entrance. One was black and the other one was white. After some flirting, the black one took a bottle of vodka and poured it down Nathan’s throat, so he said. After Nathan could hardly walk, the black girl proceeded to rape him. But you can’t rape the willing.

So he said.

They abandoned him, leaving Nathan to skip to Union to become a bard.

“Fascinating,” I said.

“Yeah,” he agreed.

“You want to walk around? Wreak havoc?” I asked.

He agreed.

I asked him to call a friend, maybe to bring some weed. I was happy to pay. He called Ramos, who was to arrive in twenty minutes. Nathan and I wandered in the meantime.

It was a hot night, but it did not bother us, we were too occupied talking. He seemed to like anarchy, drugs, his bible being the unorthodox Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and of course, sex. I was surprised he could read. After talks of false-utilitarianism and the benefits of medicinal magic mushrooms, Nathan got a call from Ramos.

“He’s in the village.”

“Let’s go,” I said.

Ramos was two hundred and fifty pounds, but his voice was too soft. This diminished his image a lot.

He had the weed.

The three of us went to the nearest 24/7 deli, back near Union Square. We got some papers and rolled in the park. Ramos stood in front, blocking us from potential cops. Some of them came, in cars across the street, but they passed us. Our hearts were pounding.

One more arrest for Nathan, and the poor guy was going to go away for a long time.
We got it rolled and lit up, walking and smoking the joint like it was a loose cigarette.
The night was still dark blue, the moon full.

We were approaching the street, away from the park. A cop car pulled in right beside us.
We stopped walking, I had the joint between my index finger and my middle finger, like a cigarette. I looked at the slightly tinted window. My reflection was cool, calm, and collected. But inside I was dying. I raised the joint and inhaled it deeply.

Like a cigarette.

The officer inside was turned to his buddy, his eyes averted from us by idle chatter. The two cops inside talked for a moment longer.

Then the car drove on. We finished the joint and walked back to the park.

The moon was full. But now we noticed it more than ever. Our heads swelled to the size of watermelons. Our minds escaped, floated to the stratosphere. The high was too intense for me so I sat down.

When I collected myself, Nathan was already sober. He was an expert pothead, and so was Ramos. So we left to a most dangerous part of the Bronx to meet my friend Ali.

The place we went to was called Castle Hill.

My friend Ali was a skinny Bengali man. In his early twenties, Ali dropped out of medical school. Currently he was dealing cocaine. Ali gave us more weed. No one paid anything.

Ali had to make a coke deal, told us to come along. Ali said a white van would pick us up.

But Nathan and Ramos were tired, they did not want to get into a white van at 4 am, so they left to Brooklyn.

I never saw them again.

The van arrived twenty minutes later. Inside were six black thugs. Ali told me it was ok. Ali told me to pass the weed, which he gave me before Nathan and Ramos left, to the six thugs.
After the driver took a hit he said, “The white boy got some good weed,” and all was good.
The van stopped near some squalid projects.

Ali made the deal, went back in the van, and the thugs dropped us off at Castle Hill. Some of them shook my hand.
Afterwards, Ali met with Hassan, his cousin, and his cousin’s friend.
The four of us went to Ali’s rooftop. There, Hassan and his friend offered me some very badly cut coke.

Why not?

It didn’t do much, and I was tired.

Dawn was breaking free, I had to go home and sleep. While I sat there in the train on the way back, I felt lonely. The fun was over and people were going to work. I was going to bed.

The alienation that the city forces onto it's residents feels strong in the essence of this piece.

I feel that there needs to be more of a tying factor in the plot to strengthen your work, but all in all it was well paced and fun.

I agree with Elenagance that this piece conveys the alienation and disassociation in Big City Drug Life, but the piece itself feels a bit "anesthetized" - interestingly enough, the exact effect that drugs have on consciousness. My question then, to you as a writer, would be, why are you writing it, and what are you feeling, being spirited along in this somewhat haphazard land of Strangers? If you could locate & amplify and magnify the feelings inside you, how would they color the work?

Writing it because it's a fun true story, I'm feeling nostalgic, indolent, and mellow, and my feelings relax my syntax.

Don't know if your question was rhetorical or not.