The Contortionist's Handbook by Craig Clevenger

Author:Craig Clevenger [Clevenger, Craig]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3, pdf
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage Publishing
Published: 0100-12-31T22:00:00+00:00

TWELVE

When you’re in love, your brain secretes endorphins into your blood. Organic morphine leaks out of a gland in your skull, feels like a low-grade opium rush. Some people confuse the two, the head rush and the love. You think you’re in love with a person, but you’re in love with a syringe. Skin like liquid silk, hair, eyes, laugh, smile, impulses, trust, confidence, curves, perfume, sweat, affection, but still a syringe. You’re high and hooked, and soon comes the more, more, more: marriage, career, mortgage, children, school, it’s harder and harder to feel that rush.

Happens all the time, men and women. Body clocks twenty years out of sync between genders, the rush dries up. You look for new hooks, new fixes, anything for that more, more, more. Some people burn their lives to the ground doing so, fodder for talk radio and daytime television. These same people assail the evils of drugs and urine-test their own children.

Sudden turned me on to coke. That was her real name, Sudden. Mine was Martin Kelly. I hadn’t had any headaches since I’d left home, but Brian Delvine had worn out his welcome in Los Angeles after three traffic warrants, one eviction and one post-employment random drug screening. I kept changing names, records and histories, getting better and better at it. I finally learned I could afford to live alone, keep the eviction notices at bay with multiple lines of credit under multiple names. It was a game that kept my slate perpetually clean. It wasn’t yet something I had to do to save my life. Then the godsplitters came back. Right after I met Sudden.

I had been born to Mr. and Mrs. Liam and Fiona Kelly twenty-seven years prior. I found them in the Boston Globe obituaries, Liam Kelly having unstatistically survived his wife for seven years after her death from a stroke. They were survived by seven children, excluding “Martin.”

It took seven weeks of correspondence with the Massachusetts Bureau of Vital Statistics, insisting they’d made a mistake, that they must have my birth record on file. I used a ream of misprinted (wrong phone number) letterhead for McKinney, Watterson and Ross from a copy shop trash bin—MW&R had an imposing chain of WASP surnames that meant either an accounting firm or legal partnership, which always greases civic wheels. Ultimately, the Bureau was willing to shoulder the blame and right a wronged birth record for the good of the tax coffers.

My landlord happily accepted an extra twenty bucks a month for one of the surplus mailboxes in our apartment building. I used that for an address, then started building a history. I secured a credit card with a $1,000 cashier’s check, charged things, paid it off. I made a list of defunct business references from a four-year-old phone book and built a résumé.

Some people say they can read handwriting the way others can read palms or cards. I didn’t believe it, but since some cops did, then some doctors might. I learned the rules and shaped my writing to fit.

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