Christodora: A Novel by Tim Murphy

Author:Tim Murphy [Murphy, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2016-08-02T07:00:00+00:00

Twelve

Born This Way

(2012)

On the street in front of the apartment in Westlake, Hector got in his long-term rental car, shaking. You are so fucking high, he told himself. The deep, deep-down survival voice told him that if he didn’t take a Klonopin right now, he was going to do something very, very bad, like drive the car over the first cliff he saw. He found the pill in the front pocket of his jeans, chewed it carefully and thoroughly, washed it down with the rest of a sticky bottle of Gatorade lying on the floor of the car. The pill wouldn’t kick in for thirty minutes, he knew, but he still had to act fast. He pulled out his cell, started to dial 911, then noticed that the young, skinny twink he’d been with had left his own cell phone on the seat of the car. All the better, then. Hector picked it up, punched in 911. The woman on the other end was immediately barking for his name, address, phone number, location.

“There’s three people fucked up on drugs in an apartment on the corner of West Second Street and South Union and I think one of them is overdosing. You have to send EMTs.”

“Sir, what is the address and number of the apartment?”

He didn’t know. “It’s right at the corner of West Second Street and South Union. It’s off-white with a flat roof.”

“Sir, what is your name? Are you at the scene, sir?”

“I told you where it is, you just better get there,” he said.

He tried to hang up but the call, an emergency call, wouldn’t let him. He backed up the car to the building, where he noted the address and spoke it into the phone. He couldn’t remember what buzzer they’d buzzed only—when was that? How much time had passed? Fifteen minutes or three hours? The sun was rising in the east, pushing dazzling grades of red and gold into the sky, the neighborhood still silent. He threw the phone onto the small plot of lawn in front of the building.

The pill wouldn’t kick in for a while, but he had to drive—he had to get out of here. No, no, wait! He couldn’t go until he knew EMTs were coming. He started the car. The volume of the radio startled him. Had they really been blasting it that loud on the way here? He turned it down. It was that Lady Gaga song from the year before, “Born This Way,” the one that sounded like the old Madonna song. Paranoid from the drugs and making too many connections, he freaked out: it was a sign from Ricky, who’d been obsessed with Madonna!

He steadied himself to drive around the corner, where he parked. He blasted the A/C; he was soaked in sweat. He thrust his right hand into his pants and slowly masturbated to give himself something to focus on, to keep himself from going crazy. He dreaded that at any minute someone might walk or jog

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