He even had drinks prepared,a bottle of beer and a glass of wine that laid there on the table for hours getting warm and waiting just like him - for her to arrive and the morning shift to plug the extra bloodstream back before he withers altogether.
Hibernating was his way of fighting the reality, his silent protest, and he was lucky to have her being pissed at looking at him wasting away a perfectly viable life and drag his ass out of it on occasion here and there and insist that he bloody graduates some time soon and hopefully snap out of it under the burden of adult responsibilities like maybe a job.
Before he qualifies for a free bus pass.
-So what were you up to today? Did you see who’s rehearsing? They are going to have a concert on Saturday night.... Although that new drummer is not extremely good, I’m glad they’re still alive.
She ignored him and headed straight for her glass because, well, she still needed the cigarettes like crazy to calm down and could use a drink right now.
Processing that last sentence as she walked past her friend, she stopped firmly and gave him that look that said:
Explain or die.
He complied and opened his mouth preparing himself to elaborate, grabbing the beer bottle and opening the door letting her in front of him outside, onto the rooftop porch or whatever that mishap of construction was.
They sat down on he hot pebbled concrete ledge, that no sane human being would consider to be more than a mere hint of a terrace, and listened to the now four people all trying to warm up their instruments at the same time.
Hope touched the floor gently hoping that the tinkle of it moving underneath her would somehow disappear if she was no longer standing.
She sipped the wine and microns of sand rolled down her tongue.
-You know the stories, right?
-What stories ? I know the bass player is out of country and that HE was in Latin America for a while.
-No, not that. The up and down stories with the most addictive ups around.
Drugs.
Yes, she knew the stories carried by the word of mouth across the town.
***
All of the original band members were branded as heavy users, but somehow she had always in the past refused to believe that a poet of such a devotion, that was yet to come up with a song that was not a condensed microcosm of complexity of everythingness was ...well,... a wretched weak fallen wingless angel heroin addict that couldn’t cope with the stress of everyday normality of life.
Sasha was turning to automatic fire now, quoting song titles and lyrics like a pack of dogs chasing out an unfortunately strayed cat from their backyard.
- The thought never crossed my mind…he goes through the city and ends up ’finally weightless, numbed’ and floating... Out – a great song from early days - actually is the junkie jargon for missing a vein when shooting up heroin with a syringe…. cold nails and hands as a reoccurring image in several songs are symptomatic of body temperature and senses losing control... - he went on and on as she listened to the band he was talking about practicing what sounded like one of the more recent songs, without vocals to help her identify the exact one.
The new songs were harsh, the battle axes dug out and put to use rhytmed ones.
Just merely paralleling the life, she thought.
-…And Hunger…-Sasha was not finished yet with giving examples, going after the most elaborate portrayal of how a person in an abstinence crisis feels trying not to give in to the craving, - ’in the circle of an eye and under the skin’…pupils …itching trackmarks…
- Ok, ok …got your point, professor Know-It-All. I could write about junkies and addiction if I wanted to because I can write, you know, and you know that I haven’t even tried marijuana - she deliberately used the official name because, for some reason, those things called drugs were something she never even considered to possibly be used by reasonable people for only no harm done casual fun and, in her view, didn’t deserve informal, warm, affectionate nicknamish jargon vocabulary to be wasted on them as such.
The genes, Sasha teased her once.
’You hillbillies are genetically high on the smell of fresh cow manure and just don’t have the ability to develop a decent taste for anything, not even for the drugs.’
Compared to the impotence of the city users-losers she had a chance to hang around here, those smelly redneck cowboys back in the mountains were her preferred type.
- But he doesn’t look like he’s using now.
- And how would you know that? Sasha was intrigued by the resolute manner of her last sentence.
- I saw him play last night. Through the window. He looks fine.
- And?
Sasha swiftly got the idea what she was talking about, being still a bit amazed himself by the brute quality of that guitar solo that flowed through the air while he was masturbating his brain over the two perfectly symmetrical dimples on her lower back trying to calculate the exact vertebrae that they marked, laying in his bed and picturing her bent down towards the floor long after she had vanished from his room the evening before.
- He ....um…- she lowered her voice and prolonged the vowel with a sigh, as she bought herself time to grab the exact thought and find a way how to word the description of him, godly and godlike, looking and provoking impure but very healthy thoughts, mind you, but stopped herself just in time.
Sasha would have a field day joking about the stupid fan teenage crush she was apparently sporting and her attempt to pretend that well this was not a classic fan-girl uh-oh.
No it wasn’t all in her head – at least she got the talking smiles.
-…well, he looked fine. She downed the glass turning it almost upside down in a single, long gulp, and reached out the hand holding the now empty glass, that stood there between them like the sentence of a hungry little Oliver Twist begging for more lunch.
Sasha did his best to restrain from asking further and ignored the fact that she only lacked in words when she was hiding them, and wondered how much longer before she bumps into that special someone and breaks his heart.
He went back inside to get himself another beer, and pour her some more watered down white wine she liked.
***
Hope was looking into the dark distance where the mountain stood invisible to the eyes but not the heart, and remembered a joke –like story her encyclopedic friend told her once about how it was the holy place where the then still pagan Slavs used to gather for their religious death rituals. Since the Slavs were very good at keeping history and archeology and mankind in general in dark about the exact place or nature of their religious practice, Sasha sort of filled out the blank pages with his version of the truth for her amusement.
He was her storyteller and he would feed her stories true and not quite, he himself wondering afterwards where the words came from, perhaps inspired by her contagious rabid imagination and seeping into his mouth.
***
When a prominent member of the tribe died, warrior men would leave the body down in the palm print of two rivers with their women to be washed and prepared for the funeral, and would climb to the top of the Avala mountain at sundown, carrying a virgin girl, not allowing the female feet to break the primal taboo and touch the sacred ground.
When the procession of silent warriors carrying their treasured cargo reached the rounded field that stood in the place of a dead volcano top, they would form a circle holding their torches with the girl laying in the center of it, and wait for the soul of their dead commander to appear in the cold and deadly silence of the midnight.
-And then they would ganbang the sacrificial virgin, because, they believed, that the earth needed to suck in the purest of all, the virgin first time blood, to ensure that the descending dead soul had a safe journey to the whatever was their version of Paradise.
***
Sasha was apparently very fond of this banging the virgin brains out part.
Sex was his favorite pastime in this town.
Getting laid was almost the only activity beside her that he indulged, with countless girls that he never bothered to call the day after or remember their names for more than the obligatory few hours.
He didn’t even keep the tab on his conquests, they were a mere need resolved successfully by-line.
Hope wondered if the story was true and what happened with the girl when they were all done with her.
No substantiated records of human sacrifices, but the virgin probably never made it down alive.
...
***
Sasha was back now, sitting by her side, holding her glass and waiting for the torches in her gazing eyes to die down.
Her imagination, and the force with which she experienced through her senses the images wandering between her mind and open eyes was something he feared would break her apart.
Madness in her eyes in such moments was what made him wait for her patiently, with religious devotion, every time she was somewhere far away, hypnotized and motionless, still and almost transparent.
The empty body that the wandering soul had shed behind.
***
Posts
