THE BONE COLLECTOR PT. II: THE END
It would only be a year after my father died that Crystal would cross my path again. In my wounded state I was deaf and dulled by my environment and pill swallowing habit. I couldn’t hear the sirens warning of an imminent tornado, I was blinded by the blur of flesh and bone falling down around me.
I was fifteen and trippin’ off two tabs of acid (my first and last time.) It was five days after a year of my pop being gone, Christmas break. As the drug began to kick in, so did the terror. I didn’t see colours or rainbows or unicorns, instead I smelled blood and felt the weight of falling stars. I thought I was in hell. A gang member dragged me through his house by the arm, telling me the devil was coming through the ceiling and then I was shoved into a car while everyone was getting more drugs. The acid had me by the balls. I got into a fist fight with someone who later turned out to be a good friend (funny how that works) and licked the blood off my knuckles where her braces has met my fist. Rabid as a dog with fangs bared. I missed my father.
Everyone was trying to calm me down but I clung to myself and later, mirrors, trying to scramble back into reality. My face melted in the reflection and I tried to climb into myself through the glass.
That’s when someone emptied a suitcase full of drugs and snagged a clear pipe. I watched in horror as they twisted the pipe back and forth, sucking up the almost translucent smoke. My brain hit fast forward and I watched “friends” turn into speed freaks, gnawing at their cuticles, talking a mile a minute. I was offered the pipe and almost tackled the person. Instead I fell down the rabbit hole of complete despair. And then the tears came in a flood of black panic. I had passed out after a hit of Nos and all the air left me. Acid will do that to you. The beast who offers no mercy, splintered nerve endings, diluted eyes full of shadows. No turning back.
After that night I wouldn’t see Crystal again for three years. I fled for safety, isolating myself from her wasteland. She was going to eat them alive. I would grow up to call skeletons friends, skeletons who settled quietly like dust on an unopened coffin.
*
I took a train to Palmdale, excited to see my half brother. Seperated after my mother’s death, this would be the third time in my life seeing him. I craved family, familiarity. He was a stranger I so badly wanted to know, but like every disappointment encountered, I should have let him stay strange. Shouldn’t have even bothered.
When I walked into the room, I did not receive hugs or a kiss. He was hunched over a desk, crushing something. Naive at eighteen, I thought he was drawing but he finally stood up I saw three big lines of sparkling evil. That bitch Crystal had my brother in her fist too. Frozen with shock and fear, I stared at his black eyes. If you looked close you could see the blue, the remnants of an ocean of potential. I felt sad. He had a few teeth left and they chattered like a puppets. She was pulling his strings. He was not alive nor dead, he was existing purely on a knee-deep addiction, false hope. The cruel and easy power of drugs.
He offered me a line. I said no and watched him with a mouth full of regret. His girlfriend did one too and they melted into the bed as their eyes watered and noses turned red. They looked like they were crying. I felt like crying.
And then I had the urge to connect with my dead father on some kind of tragic astral plane. I leaned down and did a line. Snorting a line of pure crystal meth is like getting kicked in the face with a steel toe boot. I about damn near hit the floor but within minutes I felt alive. I understood everything about the witchy attraction to amphetamines. I was strong, beautiful, alive. Each gasp for air ballooned my lungs, full of desert sand and shit. Eyes shining like crazy diamonds.
The next three days were magical as my life became a time lapse of pink sunrises and indigo blankets of infinite space. Snakes slithered beneath my feet and I shouted my dreams to the Mojave horizon. I ignored the tremors of the comedown until I started hallucinating angels singing to me and bugs crawling all over. Weak with hunger, my tongue felt like sandpaper and teeth shifted with the weight of my jaw. This was a slow death. That was Crystal’s promise - forget being human, immortality is attainable. Time doesn’t exist.
I braved the waves of a rolling comedown. I didn’t talk back to the angels. My heart ached with the memories of reality, loose brain inside my skull, my skin was dry and grey. I wanted to stop hurting, I wanted the scabs in my nose to heal. I didn’t want to be my father’s daughter.
My brother freebased in the bathroom and later in the backyard. I threw up in disgust, my gut twisted with each kick of withdrawal. I could only smoke weed until my body was heavy. Somewhere in the desert the earthquakes settled while I stared in the face of a graveyard, the tar roads that took my mother’s life. I made a vow never to return to this corner of the world, no more putting drugs up my nose.
Crystal, how I loved and hated her. Everyone was hooked on her. Thrust into the grips of a lonely, powerful, man-made infatuation. The perfect escape, an unscripted opera into madness. She would bury men, friends, lovers, anyone who wanted cheap thrills. Victims of weakened hearts and false idols.
The train ride back to Los Angeles felt longer than the hundred miles it was. The glass of the window cooled my forehead, the fever of being dope sick. A hundred miles to get back to normal, a hundred miles backwards.
