White Out Read Online Free PDF

hadn’t even blinked.
    And sometimes I gently hit the car in front of me as I was slowly starting to hit the brake. Sometimes the car behind me would honk as I was slowly starting to hit the gas. Sometimes I would think it was May when it was July.
    One time I woke up, and the little punching bag in the back of my throat was all swollen up. I mean it was huge. It took up almost the whole throat hole. The tiny bugs in the air had to go past it single file. I don’t even know what that little punching bag is called.
    “What’re you doing back there?”
    It was itchy as hell. I scratched it gently with the tip of a syringe.
    And who knows what caused that. Air bugs maybe. Something you never even noticed suddenly swells up. Swells up into your day. Squeezes out the fun.

    Later that day I met one of the people who wanted to kill people I knew. I’d heard about these people.
    “You seen Dom, man.” The young dealer’s cap was pulled down low, the brim pointed straight at my knees. He said it again. It didn’t really sound like a question.
    “No,” I said, surprised. “I just need a white top and a nickel of coke.”
    “Yeah, well,” he said, nodding at a runner across the street who came running up with the dope, “nigger owes, doesn’t pay, gets got.”
    That sounded simple. And I knew Dom owed and didn’t pay. Witness Fathead. But I thought that maybe now Dom was just a little too low to get got. A little too deep. Deep down.
    For example, I went fishing once when I was a kid. I put a hook and a weight on the end of a long line and it sank down out of sight. There was a little plastic disk attached to my fishing line. The disk floated on the surface of the water, to let you know the place where the line dropped down.
    Dom’s face and head reminded me of that disk bobbing on the water. His visible body was just a marker, marking the place where he went down. I’d seen three hundred dollars of dope go into that body in one sitting. Go in and go down. How can you stop it? Who or what is it?
    “Nigger needs to get got.”
    I mentally wished the teenage dealer good luck. I didn’t think he knew what he was dealing with. Dom shot overdoses in his neck. He woke up crawling. Crawling for more. I didn’t think Dom could be stopped. He was something uncanny. Raw habit.
    But then I wondered how easy it would be to stop me. How easy would it be for me to stop?
    I’d gotten in the bad habit of scribbling down “Quit Dope” notes when I woke up freaked out in the middle of the night. When I woke up suddenly like that, I kind of surprised my life. I saw it as it was when it thought no one was looking at it. Looking up at my life from that angle way down deep in the night, I saw what was wrong. I knew I wouldn’t remember the secret in the morning. I’d be back in it. I’d be it.
    Lying awake in the middle of the night I knew the answer, and I knew I wouldn’t remember it. Those deep-night panics were moments outside of memory. Unconnected. The hyper-clear night thoughts didn’t stick around. They evaporated at the first breath. Writing was invented for the thoughts you can’t remember. Writing is an aid to memory. So I’d scribble down “Quit Dope” notes and “My Life Matters” notes and leave them in obvious places around my apartment.
    Every morning I’d wake up and throw the notes out without reading them. Then I’d drive, steal, score, and pass out.
    I knew how to write. Reading was the problem. It is easier to write than it is to read. In the middle of the night I started to wonder how to get myself to read the damn notes. I began to experiment with different colored ink, super-big letters, super-small letters. But by then developments had rendered this nighttime project obsolete. By spring, daytime things had got me thinking about quitting in the daytime.
    First, there was the billboard, right on Charles Street near the train station. It had a picture of a stethoscope floating in a sunny sky. At the