The Opiate, Fall Vol. 19
Les Bats Youssef Alaoui
I
don’t want to get bombed and stay up all night again like we used to. I always found myself out long after midnight and sloppy drunk, trying to bow out of the next unfortunate incident. One night, early on, I had to pull him off a poor normal sap before he could scream into his ears and rip his eyes out about how trite and dull he was. What a critic. I grabbed him by the arm and that’s when I met the mongoose in him. He curled his eyebrows together in a way that made me look down at his hands for a knife. I said Come on! It’s only poetry! And he said I would kill for a good poem! I would gladly kill you for a good poem! And he grabbed me by the shirt collar. I threw him to the floor. He kept my collar with him as he went down. Yanked my neck. We both stormed out of the reading. That’s pretty much why I’m not interested in getting so drunk, staying up all night, and sleeping in the walls of buildings like a bat. He was skinny enough. He showed me how to search for a good exterior wall on a thick old building,
14.
with a chimney flue or radiator pipes. Look up! See? He would say. He would point to a grouping of pipes at the edge of the roof. This one’s good to go. Then we’d look down at street level and sure enough he’d find us a hole or some kind of access point at the base of the wall and we’d shimmy right on up. He was skinny but I was losing it. Too many years of drinking. Too much food. Too much pain. He hadn’t had The Pain yet. The pain of profound loss. But he was high on ideas and meds. He was high on his age. He still figured he was at the center of his reality and that he could fight the devil with meditation, drink and sex. I never saw him eat. Yes. Once. Yes, he ate salami sticks and corn chips. Gulped down red wine after. He didn’t need much sleep. He had stopped into my place then beckoned me out to the streets once more. We drank and smoked in the alleys of Montmartre late at night. He danced and sang. I thought of you, by the way. It rained steadily all night. We were soaked. I stank like wet wool. We finally climbed into the wall of a giant old hotel at
