Soul Kitchen by Poppy Z. Brite

Author:Poppy Z. Brite
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307345318
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2006-07-25T00:00:00+00:00

Late that night, long after the restaurant was closed and G-man was asleep, Rickey stepped out onto the front porch. He had tossed and thrashed for what felt like hours, then finally extricated himself from the sweat-soaked bedclothes. He turned on the TV, but nothing caught his interest. He tried the radio, but turned it off when he realized he’d just spent ten minutes listening to the religious guy on WWL enumerate all the reasons he was going to hell. When he found himself in the bathroom staring at the mirrored door of the medicine cabinet—willing himself not to open it—he knew he had to leave the house entirely, if just for a few minutes.

Marengo Street was dark and still. Rickey remembered how, in childhood, the hush of a late-night city street had made him feel as if all the world was waiting for something to happen. Now the idea seemed as foreign as the memory of a time without physical pain. Nothing was going to happen. The pain wasn’t going to go away. He wondered what he had been waiting for.

Christ, this wasn’t him, this weak, whining crybaby. He didn’t know himself these days. He remembered Lenny telling him, You’re tough, you’re stubborn, and you’ve got a self-preservation instinct ten miles wide…you’re not going to turn into a drunk or a cokehead, because it would interfere with your ability to do your job right. When they’d started working with Lenny, they had considered him kind of a joke, a soft-handed celebrity chef who hardly knew his way around a kitchen anymore. “Hell,” Rickey remembered saying, “the hair on his arms isn’t even burnt off.” That was a long way from reality, Rickey knew now. He wanted to be independent of Lenny someday, but he’d learned more from Lenny than from anyone else he’d ever known. Lenny had no idea how much Rickey admired him, and Rickey wouldn’t want him to know.

Those words tonight, though, made Rickey feel as if Lenny didn’t know him at all. How tough was he these days, and how self-preserving? The damn drug had gotten on top of him. Even now, when he hadn’t taken any for two weeks, it was all he could think about.

His back hurt most of the time. When faced with the low, constant throb, a wide array of over-the-counter painkillers had laughed weakly, laid down, and died. Even more than an end to that, though, he craved the slow spreading warmth in his belly and his mind, the feeling that was like being cradled in the hand of God, though he had never believed in God. The pills had given him a vacation from his own constant, grinding rage. In his heart he knew he needed the rage, but it had been nice not to be at its mercy all the time.

He walked out into the middle of the street and craned his neck, looking for stars. The lacework of the summer trees and the ambient pale purple glow of

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