The Speed Chronicles Read Online Free PDF Page B

that possible? Could they have pissed in your armpits three weeks ago, and you just now noticed? Like, say, when you get in a cab, and the seat’s wet after a pack of frat boys beer-up too hard and leave Bud puddles. Hop inside and—QUESTION: why does your God hate you? —you hear the splat when you hit the seat. But—ANSWER: because you’re a tweaker! —you don’t know you’re full wet-ass till you squish out of the cab. (“People never call the police until it’s wet-ass time.” Al Pacino, Sea of Love .) Speed keeps you so clammy you can’t feel damp. Just one of the many advantages!
    Fucking alcoholics! Where’s the dignity? Remember that dancer—Lola? Lurleen? Patricia?—with the misspelled devil ink on her neck. HAIL SATIN! “It’s not a mistake, it’s a statement!” It was Lurleen. She had some kind of jailhouse harelip that slurred her words to the left. “You ass-maggot, you think I’m a fucking creatine ?” Upscale. After eleven vodka tonics you’d see day-workers hand her five sweaty dollar bills to lift her skirt and geeze in her labia, which weirdly resembled a gorilla ear. You’d seen one once, in a French Quarter voodoo store. It was supposed to bring its owner lifelong protection and success. From the moment the Sisters of Marie Laveau Gift Shop door hissed shut behind you, you knew you should have bought the thing. Everything would have been different. Why are you such an asshole?
    Are you crying?
    Want to talk about how Lurleen (Darla? No, Zelda ) would boot the vag-needle, let it stand up and quiver by itself, then grand finale with a Heimlich-like shudder and pass out forehead-first on the bar with the rig sticking out between her legs? The pink tip made it weirdly like a little dog’s organ, aroused. (You suffer compulsive thoughts—sometimes just images—that you do not want to think, but cannot stop thinking. This is one of them.) Sometimes she’d wet herself. Who wouldn’t? “ Five more bucks! ” she’d croak when she came to and saw her condition. (Remember when mysterious Chasids began to speak to you out of the ceiling? A rabbi would just appear: you’d realize you were staring at him, and that he was talking. You’d think, maybe he was always there. And it took THIS MUCH crystal to see him. The sad old shtetl eyes followed you from the TV as he spoke. Vaguely reassuring, vaguely menacing.) Does your life ever feel like a continuum of one aberration, misreflected in a series of cracked rear-view mirrors? You’d think: misreflected? How lame. Then you’d rethink. He’s right! Every speed-freak car you ever twitched in did have a crack in the rearview. (You once drove across the state of Utah, steering the wheel from the passenger side when the 300-pound Cherokee who picked you up hitchhiking snorted something that gave him a heart attack going ninety-five on an empty interstate. You couldn’t move him, so you just steered until his husk of an Impala ran out of gas on I-15, outside of Bountiful.) All the tweak-mobiles had cracked rearview mirrors. How does that even happen once? And how does Rabbi Bowlstein know ?
    You don’t even want to talk about this, but here you are, talking about it. Keep babbling, Chatty Speed Guy. People are really into it. You’re crushing them . Sartre knew what hell was—and it wasn’t other people. That’s a mistranslation. His translator had the twitches from le meth and spilled vin rouge on the words dans ta tete . THE OTHER PEOPLE WERE IN YOUR HEAD. If you were on speed, you’d know what he knew: speed means being your own audience for the running commentary of death. Or worse than death. More of this . What you’re feeling right now.
    CRASHING 2 : WHAT’S THAT LIKE? Remember how you felt the first time you couldn’t get it up? The scalding rage. The way Cheeto-dry Cindy Carmunuci