Two Minutes Forty-Five Seconds

(Content warning: drug use, abuse, language, mature themes)

Ahuge chunk of my ceiling falls off onto my bed while I’m sleeping like something out of the Godfather. I mean, that’s not really how the Godfather goes, but I did wake up to a chunk of plaster in the shape of a horse’s head in the bed next to me. I can’t think of anyone else to call and of course Dustin is still up because he’s always up at two A.M. just smoking weed and listening to LP’s (“fuck streaming, man”) and he’s like “of course, dude, come over. Mi casa and all that.”

But when I get to Dustin’s house, the house I lived in less than two months ago, he tells me that my old room is “Occupado, man,” offering me a sip of his whiskey. “Of course I needed to rent it out. But there’s a mattress on the floor in the basement. It’s pretty comfy, actually.

Especially if you’re high.” He grins, pointing, by way of invitation, to a joint that’s sitting on top of a milk crate alongside a bag of more joints and a copy of the Necronomicon.

“But didn’t you, like, get some cats?” I ask. This is actually why I moved out. “I mean, don’t the cats live in the basement?”

Dustin studies me for a second, then busts out laughing. His long wheat-blonde hair could use a wash. “Yeah, man,” he says, “My grandma moved into an old folks’ and left me her felines. So what?”

“I told you, man. I have, you know, a phobia of cats.”

This cracks him up. Like, totally cracks him up. Dude can barely breathe.

“No you don’t, man! Nobody has a phobia of cats!” He gives me a fresh joint from the baggie. His house is a never-ending stream of joints emerging from everywhere. “Look. Dude. Smoke this shit. The new roommate brought it. It’s a brand-new batch. It’ll help you forget whatever ails you.”

 

And now I’m down here with the ticking from a clock somewhere that I can’t find, and the rattling of a fluorescent light in its death throes, and the smell of ammonia so strong I can barely breathe and a half dozen cats circling the cum-stained mattress staring at me like they want to eat me alive.

“It’s going to be okay,” I say out loud to myself. “Elmar, this is gonna be all right.” An orange cat comes right up to me and hisses.

I lean my back against the wall and light the joint. Someone has been drawing on it. There’s a hammer and sickle and a bunch of flowers and hearts, like some little Russian girl with a crush got a hold of tiny markers and went to town. What in the fuck? I should’ve just stayed home. Five cats are trying to climb up on the bed and I have to swat them away with a dirty pillow.

I am not the lunatic for having a phobia of cats. Everyone is always crooning, “he’s so cute!” as they show you their torn up arms, bloodied by little Pumpkin. Cats have death in their eyes, they shit in a box and they kill for sport, and now, though they’re supposedly loners, three of them are conspiring in a corner to come for me because I’m too big for them to kill  alone.

This weed is strong as hell. My legs feel like they’re getting bigger and heavier, like they’re filling up with blood or mercury or something, but my arms are getting lighter and starting to raise up above my head like helium balloons tied to my armpits. The cats are all just staring at me now. An especially huge striped cat, this motherfucker must weigh thirty pounds, is concentrating on me so hard it seems like he’s about to start floating up in the air so he can get eye to eye.

It occurs to me that this is not normal weed. This is bad. Really really really bad. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my twenty-seven years, it’s this: things can always get worse.

You can’t really call it a knock on the door, because it’s not a door—it’s a door frame with some mandala-ass tapestry hung over it, but somebody knocks on it. And before I can even respond, he pops his head in anyway. And when he does, “Jimmy Jim” Johnson, tall and thin, with a big pot belly and a baseball cap tilted to the side, a thirty-seven year old dressed like an eighteen year old, I know for a fact this is not regular weed, and I know for a fact that the trouble hasn’t even begun. About a minute later I see, because it takes her that long to peep her head in, that he’s got a girl with him, an actual girl, probably about fifteen. Her face is pale and long, and her hair is mouse-brown, down to her waist and limp. She’s got a chunk of it in her mouth and she’s sucking on it hard. She’s holding a sandwich on a flat palm like a platter.

“Brooooooo,” says Jimmy. “What’s crackalackin?” He reaches his hand out to the girl and she gives him the sandwich. He winks at me.

“Begone!” I say (I’m really high) but either Jimmy doesn’t notice or I don’t actually say it out loud. Then I wave my hands, trying to conjure a spell to get him out of there.

“Damn,” he says, looking at my waving hands and waving back like I’m greeting him from far away. “It smells like piss in here. But I guess you don’t have a choice. Dustin told me about your pad, man. I guess he didn’t know we know each other. I was like ‘oh yeah man, me and the E-dog go way back.’”

I’d met Jimmy back when the girl I was dating was roommates with the girl he was dating, and I’d seen enough of that guy in two months to last me a lifetime. That was a couple of years ago, but he looks the same: pale as hell, mud-brown hair, and that same stupid outfit: green A’s cap cocked to the side, jeans sagged down to his ass.

“What do you think of that weed, man?” he asks cheerfully, looking around. Then he just says, “cats.”

“Dude,” I say, holding up the joint. My words sound blurry. “What is it?”

Jimmy doesn’t do regular drugs, not ever, a fact I guess Dustin doesn’t know yet (when did Jimmy move in? yesterday?) His deal is he’s trying to find the next big thing drug-wise, the next meth or whatever “but natural,” he says. “something cool and natural.” I haven’t touched any of his drugs since he gave me some shit a few years ago he was calling the “Kratom Bomb,” that made everything around me go black while meanwhile I felt my head was going to explode. When I came out of it, I was screaming at the top of my lungs and Jimmy was screaming back at me, laughing. His girlfriend was lying on the floor passed out with a black eye.

“Did I…do that?” I asked.

“Oh yeah,” Jimmy said, suddenly serious, “I tried to stop you but you were outta control, man. It was crazy.”

I was freaking out. “Holy shit is she okay?”

“Nah dude,” Jimmy laughed. “You didn’t do that. She’s fucking fine. She was just talking back.”

 

Now my legs are pretty much paralyzed and my hands are above my head in a rollercoaster-rider position but I can’t get them to go down. Jimmy’s new girl is on her hands and knees in a faceoff with the fattest cat.

“Shit’s pretty great, huh?” says Jimmy. “It’s Jimson Weed. Jimson Weed, a touch of Mandrake Root and this amazing shit called Borametz. Well look, man, it’s not new, it’s ancient, right? From Russia? But I have got the hookup. This dude named Sergei—Russia, right? His grandma has been nursing a plant for, like, centuries. Now she passed and she left the plant to him and he’s finally putting it to its, you know, proper use.”

My neck is frozen and Jimmy is talking and talking. I’m pretty much all the way paralyzed now. This tiny black bad luck (too late) scraggle-toothed cat comes drooling up to me and curls up in my lap. She digs her claws through my jeans into my thighs for three solid minutes and purrs louder than that ticking clock which seems to be ticking faster and faster and then she finally settles and starts snoring, a puddle of drool forming on my lap.

And Jimmy Jim Johnson, that son of a bitch, is still going strong, talking through bites of his sandwich, crumbs on his chin, “seriously dude, you should try this shit when you’re fucking, right babe?”

The girl is holding on to a black and white spotted cat like it’s a doll, not a baby but a doll and I wonder what the difference in how you hold the two is. I also wonder what drug Jimmy was taking because I literally can no longer even speak, let alone move my dick.

“Seriously man,” Jimmy says. The girl sucks on her hair and looks at nothing: not me, not the cat, nothing. “She was so tight I couldn’t even get my dick in her, too big you know, until we started using this Borametz, but man this shit works wonders, right, babe?”

She shows no signs of hearing him and he shows no signs of noticing.

“Dude, though, Sergei has the best horticulturalist and he’s breeding all these new plants and everything and this shit is off the CHAIN. We’re going to take over Minneapolis man, wait and see. Just let me know if you want a piece of the business.”

From upstairs, Dustin starts yelling, or more accurately, yowling. “Jeh-meh,” he says. “Jeh-MEH!” He sounds like his mouth is full of mud. Obviously, he’s been smoking this stuff too.

Jimmy laughs. “Yeah man,” he says, righting his hat. “It’s starting to hit.” He pats the girl on her ass then grabs her by the chin, sticks his tongue down her throat.

“I’ll be right back, babe. You stay down here and play with the pussies.” He winks at me again. As soon as he lets go of her head, it drops back down to where it was before.

He lumbers off. When he’s reached the top of the stairs and closed the door behind him, she drops the spotted cat without ceremony, which shocks the cat, since he was sleeping. Then she cocks her head and looks at me like I’m a strange type of animal she’s never seen before.

There’s something frightening in her, ghost-like. The fat cat, who’s standing guard by the foot of the bed, hisses as she comes near. The little black cat in my lap, still sleeping, purrs and digs her claws into my thighs. The girl is humming (or purring?) too. She grabs a handful of her hair, puts it in her mouth, then crouches down and pets the cat on my lap, who, in sleep, claws deep enough to draw blood. The girl smiles.

I mean, what’s a little rain? What’s a little plaster on the bed? I could’ve just stayed at home. The girl crawls down to the foot of the bed on hands and knees, the fat cat growling at her. I think he likes me. She reaches up, grabs my ankles and pulls me down. I slide easily because there are no sheets, only the smooth fake satin of the bare mattress. The little bad-luck-too-late cat just tumbles down between my legs, still snoring and the girl slinks up in the bed beside me, then she turns my head to face her. She’s still hum-purring. And smiling a little now.

The reason Jimmy can fuck her on Borametz, I realize, is because it paralyzes her. When I came to out of the Kratom Bomb, I said, “man that was intense,” and he said, “I don’t know man, I never touch the stuff.” I forgot that part until I see the look in her eyes. There’s a little laugh under her purr. And she starts to run her fingernails over my skin—only two fingers she’s left long, the rest have been chewed to the quick.

I can see the stains on the mattress: cum stains, blood stains, something green. I can see her pale, dry skin and her wet red eyes, her pupils huge and still dead—how is that possible? Her mouth is also wet. So wet, almost drooling. Her breath smells of rotten carrots. She grins and holds her hand over my crotch like she’s going to grab my dick, then moves it away. She actually laughs, a tiny laugh, like an old lady trying not to waste the little energy she has left.

 

When I was eight, my cousin Hal and his parents came to visit from Reno. I thought Hal was the most awesome guy on earth because he wore flip-flops all year long and terrycloth shorts and shades inside and he had a little moustache even though he was only sixteen. Looking back, there was something kind of porny about the kid, but at the time, I thought he was so cool. He was the first guy I drank with, the first guy I smoked weed with (in fact, this might have been the very day.) He had a weird terrycloth softness to him, a mustachioed sweetness—like that TV detective Magnum, P.I., like he would protect you.

Anyway, he was in town and our parents were all off somewhere doing whatever parents did in the nineties: cocaine or key parties or whatever, and we got it in our heads that we should drink schnapps and fuck around with this new Murphy bed that my mom had got—you know the kind of bed that folds into the wall? My mom was totally miserable, so she bided her time by remodeling rooms in the house. I didn’t know then that we were rich, but Hal told me. “Rich people like your ma, they’re never happy with anything. Not even the way rooms look.”

“You’re a cool little dude,” he said. “If you ever need to get out of here, come live with me in Reno. But you’re gonna have to get a job in the casino like me. You’re not afraid of workin’ are ya?”

“No,” I said.

“Good kid,” he said.

The room used to be the playroom with all my toys but now she’d decided that I was old enough to live without a playroom, so she’d made it into a guest room. It was so new, it smelled like a hotel. The wallpaper was tan with pastel feathers and the carpet was the color of ash. The game we played was—and this is why it’s on my mind right now—you laid on the bed and held your arms above your head, the same position I’m in right now—and the other person would fold the bed into the wall with you in it in the dark for about fifteen seconds, and then they’d yank you down. It was like a ride, but you didn’t know when it was coming.

But maybe like my third turn, Hal left me there for a long time. It felt like a really long time. I could hear strange sounds, muffled: LL Cool J playing in the background, something that sounded almost like choking. I thought for a minute that something had happened to Hal, and I pushed and pushed to get out of the bed but it wouldn’t budge. I couldn’t breathe and the chemical smell of the brand-new mattress, which had been a little sickeningly sweet before, made me feel like I was going to vomit. And choke on it. And die choking on my own vomit like Jimi Hendrix, who Hal had told me about. I tried to scream but there was mattress in my face and he probably couldn’t hear me. I started writhing around in there, trying to scream but I couldn’t, and not because of the mattress now, but because I was hyperventilating too hard. By the time he pulled me down, I was wheezing.

“Oh man, relax, little buddy, relax,” said Hal. He was laughing, but trying hard not to. I jumped up and he put one arm around me in a kind of side hug. “It’s okay, bud.”

“You almost killed me!” I gasped. “You left me in there for a-a an hour!”

“No, kid. It was two minutes forty-five seconds. I was watching on the Timex.” He called his watch “the Timex” because he was saving up for a Rolex.

He pet my head with long, comforting strokes. I was growing my hair out long like his hair. “Nobody was going to hurt you, bud. You’re a cool kid.” And I saw there was a hard-on peeking out of those terrycloth shorts.

He ended up peddling his ass on the street for heroin. Big surprise. And in his coffin, he looked like he was eighty, even though he was only thirty-one, a pretty good stretch for a dude like that. His hair was still long, his moustache bushy and long now too. He looked a little like Dustin, come to think of it.

 

“Relax, relax,” the girl whispers into my ear, her voice the same as her laugh, tinny and wet. I can’t fight back and she knows it. And she likes it, her eyes gleaming when she plops her head back down across from me. She puts her hands, both of them, under my shirt, running her fingers up my chest, humming a tuneless tune.

She picks up the joint off the floor and puts it to my mouth, pinching my nose until I inhale. I’m going to be paralyzed forever, at least until Jimmy finds me on this bed with his girlfriend and kills me, and this cat is going to be planted between my legs forever, and what I wouldn’t give for a nice horsehead of plaster to fall from the ceiling right onto my solar plexus, right where she’s dragging her claws.

“This is what boys like,” she says. She’s smiling, grinning really, like what a person who has no idea how to smile would do if they were pretending to smile.

 

Like I said, it can always get worse. And I know it’s about to, because the girl starts hissing. The fat cat tries to get up on the mattress, maybe to save me from her, but she knocks him off and he screams bloody murder like only a cat can, but he keeps trying. This wakes up the cat between my legs, which feels to me like a nest of snakes hatching, and then because the fat cat’s screams freak the little cat out, the little cat claws me in the balls and the fat cat scratches the girl, who grabs him and twists his head, like something, this time really, out of the Godfather. I’m sure she’s not strong enough to really break his neck, but she’s done something terrible to him because he’s not even yowling anymore, he’s just making this strange squeaking sound. She lies back down again, grinning, and stares at me.

And then the sound of Jimmy’s boots, unmistakable. I hope she’s planning to hop out of the bed when she knows her homicidal boyfriend is near, but she shows no signs of it. In fact, she holds her hand above my groin again. I think of Jimmy’s ex, lying there lifeless as a doll. When she came to, we tried to take her to the hospital, but she wouldn’t go. “I don’t want to make him angrier,” she said. My girlfriend broke up with me pretty soon after that and I have no idea what happened to that girl.

Just before Jimmy bobs his head in through the curtain, the girl moves her hand. The fear of Jimmy is different than the fear I feel of the cat at my groin, than the fear of the ghost-girl’s smile, than the fear of the fat cat’s whimpers. I can taste all these fears so distinctly now in my frozen state.

“The fuck, dude?” Jimmy yells, “You messing with my girl?” Of course I can’t respond so I just sit there and wait for the first blow. Even though I can’t do anything about it, I can still feel my body readying to run.

“Ha ha just fucking with you dude. Skinny longhairs like you ain’t her type. Besides, Katie’s a good girl, aren’t you princess? She never talks back.” He holds out a hand to her and she stands up. She grins at me, but puts back on her sullen face right before she turns to Jimmy. He grabs her ass.

“You feeling sleepy, princess? Did you lie down to get some rest? It’s okay. It’s late.” Then he turns to me. “Dustin is so fucked up right now, dude. You should hear him talk. It’s like his tongue is a foot long or something. It’s hilarious. This shit is choice, right?” The girl twists a long strand of hair all the way around her neck.

“What’s up with that one?” Jimmy kicks at the fat cat with his toe. It doesn’t respond. “Dude Dustin’s gonna be pissed if you killed his cat. Not that I’d blame you.”

“Anyway, man, it’s so cool you’re here. I hope you stay a while. It’ll be just like old times.” He turns out the light. And Jimmy and his girl are gone. And I’m alone in the dark.

Now that I think about it, that definitely was the first day I smoked weed. I remember Hal outside, sitting on this old fallen oak, his elbows leaned heavily on his knees, a posture of his father’s he’d clearly been practicing. The smell of summer, the mosquitoes, rubbing bug spray onto our skin, and then he pulled out the joint.

“You’re a man now, Elmar,” he said, handing it to me. And I felt like a man because he said it. And then he suggested we go inside and play the game.

The cat starts crying again meekly. The sound cuts through my sternum and I wonder why, if I’m paralyzed, I can’t be spared feeling this–this pain, why I can’t be spared the crawling skin of the bad luck cat bumping on the bed and curling up under my armpit.

I don’t believe in God but what did I do to deserve this? I didn’t trap a kid in a bed and time his screams on my Timex while my dick got harder and harder. I didn’t beat my girlfriend for “talking back” or fuck a paralyzed fifteen year old girl or break a cat’s neck for fun. The fluorescents are still pinging and the clock ticks faster and then slower like time goes in no order at all. Tomorrow I’ll wake up and this will all be over. I’ll walk upstairs and drink coffee. Maybe the fat cat will even be okay. And this will be just another stupid story about Jimmy Jim, another stupid story about getting trapped somewhere in the dark and getting out of it, something you forget, or something you think you forget until you’re caught back inside it again.