The mirror was filthy, almost as filthy as Tantra’s cunt, but she had the blow so I wasn’t going to say so out loud. I was holding a straw we’d gotten from a McDonald’s earlier, taking it out of the crappy paper wrapping and rolling it over my thumb with my middle and forefinger anxiously. Tantra opens her purse, digs past empty cigarette cartons and convenient store receipts and her wallet - which has no money in it - to find the dime bag. The eight ball is clean, and uncut inside the clear plastic, dusted white. She pulls out her wallet and produces a razor from the change purse to chop with. The razor is dirtier than the mirror (but still not as dirty as Tantra’s cunt), and I feel a pulse of revulsion. I think for a single moment, Am I really going to let that anywhere near my nasal passages? But then I remind myself that unless I have something better to chop the drugs with there isn‘t anything I‘m about to do about it. After all, cleanliness is godliness and I’m as far from God as any one person can possibly be.
Tantra looks up at me. All I can think is that she is wearing far too much lipstick and that the shade is too dark for her skin tone anyways. She looks like a whore who’s trying too hard, with her blonde hair frizzing more than it’s curling and her pleather miniskirt. God, she has to be carrying seven strands of HIV as we speak. And maybe a whole new one she made up all on her own. I don’t want to be near her. I don’t want to know her. I don’t want to call her my friend. But she’s holding the blow so fuck me if I’m going to do a damn thing about it.
She’s chopping it up into a fine powder on the mirror now, and it makes me sick just to look at it. It tastes so horrible you want to scrape it out of the back of your throat with a fucking spoon and you don’t feel any different than when you started. All it does it take every cent you ever had or ever will have and addicts you on top of that. I stare down at the lines on the mirror like a train wreck you just can’t tear your eyes away from. I feel so incredibly empty inside, and I have the sudden urge to puke my guts out. All I want is a fucking fix but this is the last place in the world I want to be.
I find myself simultaneously entranced and repulsed by the disorder and tragedy of my life. I pray silently, but secretly I know that God is so far away that he’s just as helpless as me. It seems so dark in this dilapidated bathroom that I almost feel myself choking on the shadowy grime. For a moment, I almost wish I would. Choke on the grime, that is.
Tantra has already done five lines of cocaine in the time it took me to think that last paragraph or so. Jesus. She didn’t even use the fucking straw. She looks at me expectantly in between her eyes rolling back into her head and her sniffling noises. God she’s so disgusting. Her nose is almost entirely covered in it.
I lean forward and use the straw, ripping off a smaller chunk so I can snort better and lowering the ragged half to the mirror while I guide the smooth half into one nostril. I breathe in deeply as I move down the length of the line and it feels like something has climbed through my nose and into my brain. I fight down the urge to cough it back up, since I really can’t - physical impossibility.
And that’s when I realize that doing cocaine is a metaphor for my life. It sucks, costs money, I can’t cough it back up, and it will eventually kill me.