Tag: Miracle

We had tried the Tijuana thing and finally gotten married on paper although we considered ourselves married after the third night we spent together. The secret to a legally binding Tijuana wedding is to just get the paperwork from the appropriate offices on the US side ahead of time and then as long as an officiant and witness signs it you are good. We tried New Orleans after that but LaPorsha never really liked it there. The thing about racism in America is that it comes in regional varieties like pizza or the name for carbonated, sweetened beverages. You can be completely inoculated to California style racism but find Louisiana style racism untenable or vice-versa.

We were starting to be on heroin and, socially speaking, that never really helps.

Back in California LaPorsha got too sleepy on an early morning Los Angeles to San Diego drive and rear ended somebody with the Diesel Mercedes. We didn’t realize the impact had destroyed the hood latch and ended up shattering our windshield the moment we got back up to the freeway’s required 60. The engine on that thing would have lasted forever – the odometer had been stuck somewhere in the 300k range when we bought it from Kelman and when he bought it from whoever he got it from too. It was an ‘81 and I’m pretty certain it had been crushing miles every year in the interim without ever sitting dry-docked.

We’d been through a lot with it. The radiator sprung a leak while we were trying to visit some kind of outsider artist sculpture garden a couple of hours outside of New Orleans. A friend came through with the Triple A connect to tow us back into town and I ended up with our radiator bungee corded to the back of a bike to visit a shop that still welded the leaks shut. Every town seems to have at least one diesel Mercedes guy – in New Orleans his name was Markus. He helped us put it back together.

We drove through rural Texas in acute withdrawal. LaPorsha finally succumbed to exhaustion and flipped us into a sandy berm. The local police got us a free motel room and in the morning it turned out that we only needed air put back into a couple tires. Imagine running onto sand from a paved parking lot while wearing flip flops and they kind of slip off your feet. That basically happened to the two tires on the passenger side. The tire shop charged me five bucks to put the air in and we were on our way.

The crazier story happened when we were living in an old motel in Joshua Tree. It had its own parking lot off the main drag with an empty swimming pool, decommissioned bus and a few dead cars and golf carts. It wasn’t actually fenced or walled off but we let ourselves get complacent and imagine that it was. It was actually just off of a kind of arroyo slash alley that served as a natural habitat for the small town’s tweakers. When we woke up to find the car missing we had probably been leaving the keys just sitting on the driver’s seat for a solid two weeks.

The thieves showed up on camera fueling it up at the only gas station in town a couple of blocks from where they took it. We were actually lucky they hadn’t put regular gas in it, potentially destroying the diesel motor, I think most random tweaker joyriders would have. The trail went cold from there until a lady deeper in the desert spotted it abandoned on her property a couple days later. There was a tense moment when it seemed like she wasn’t going to tell us where it was but we got to the bottom of it. It turned out her and the motel owner were kind of rival Pit Bull hoarders and she didn’t want him knowing where she lived – understandably really because he totally sucked.

The Mercedes had gotten stuck driving into a patch of especially deep sand but that wasn’t the real problem. The thieves had kept or disposed of the keys along with everything else in the car including an impressive collection of porcelain Venetian Clowns from the high desert’s many thrift stores. The car was a luxury vehicle when new and therefore had been outfitted with some pretty heavy anti theft features. Without an actual key replacing the ignition tumbler would have required shattering some kind of pin in the steering column after distempering it with a blowtorch.

Despite the vehicle’s age it would have technically been possible to send off the VIN number and proof of ownership to Mercedes Benz of America and receive a duplicate key in the mail but for the fact that the doors and ignition had separate keys. This meant it was no longer the factory ignition. We called Kelman who called the person he bought it from who called the person he bought it from but nobody had a spare key stashed. We decided to pull it out of the sand first and tackle the key problem later.

The Pit Bull lady had a neighbor with a tractor who became very enthusiastic about the project. This enthusiasm led directly to a series of happy accidents. He started the process by attaching a hook and chain directly to the rear bumper. Now I don’t know a lot about cars but I do know what is a reasonable part of a heavy object to attach a chain to if you are trying to move it versus what is a thing that you will just pull off of that object. I probably know this because of trying to help the United States Coast Guard tow these crazy junk rafts that had no reasonable parts to attach chains to.

There was also the fact that the tweakers had already tried tying a short hemp rope to the front license plate Mount and only succeeded in bending it out of shape.

We showed up just as he was getting started in earnest and I began to walk towards his tractor to tell him he should reattach the hook to the A-frame. Thankfully before I could do that the entire rear bumper came sailing off and landed in the sand in front of the tractor. Inside that bumper was a small black Velcro pouch, inside that pouch was a spare key. Moving the car was easy after that – we just turned it on and put it in reverse with a lot of people pushing in the front and the tractor pulling in the back. Getting the bumper to stay back on was less easy but some twisted up coat hangers did the trick.

We went through a few other misadventures like this, mostly in the seasonal marijuana cultivation laborer industry, but the shattered windshield turned out to be more than we could seem to come back from. The engine was undamaged but the radiator was leaking water again. We did a couple of dope runs in this condition, frequently refilling the water and crossing our fingers that no one in authority would take umbrage with the shattered windshield, but eventually our faithful Mercedes was left to languish under a tarp.

We sold it to one of those guys that always seems to have a partially wooden homemade trailer for three hundred dollars.

LaPorsha decided that we should try getting a van and I was excited for any alternative to living back at my mother’s house. We had been making trips up to Los Angeles anyway and just pitching a tent in different parks to avoid having to stay at anybody’s place. A van that we could actually lay down and sleep in sounded like a definite improvement. We took the last trains and buses of the day to go look at a boxy white rape van in North County that said “great for homeless” right in the Craigslist ad.

The van cost nine hundred dollars and was basically fine but we did learn a couple of lessons about used vehicle shopping from the experience. The first one was that if buying a vehicle represents your only potential way of getting home from the unfamiliar area where you go to look at it you aren’t really “looking at it”. Our only option for not sleeping on the street that night was buying the van. The second lesson was to contact the DMV and find out how much back registration was owed on a vehicle. In this case it turned out to be three and a half thousand dollars so we just never registered it.

I really liked living in a van. We lived around this park in Beverly Hills with a Sikh Temple on the block. I read somewhere recently that they always have food for the homeless but they literally never offered – they seemed like yuppy Sikhs. We parked at a couple libraries a lot. We lived around Echo Park and did the thing where you have to move once a week. This weird DMV services office in Glassell Park just gave us free registration stickers to keep us from getting harassed. I started working at my old private tutoring job again.

Eventually LaPorsha got an appointment at this dentist office on Washington and Redondo and I realized there was a methadone clinic in the same building. I had tried it in Chicago when somebody was selling water soluble wafers and always thought it felt pretty similar to heroin. We were in a weird place with our use – LaPorsha would have never started using heroin had it not been for me but I would have never started using every day had it not been for her. I had always self regulated to avoid physical dependence but using as a couple removed this option. Methadone provided relief from the pressure of needing to find money for heroin on a daily basis.

It was still possible in those days to use the internet to find a few middles, people who wanted heroin but for a variety of reasons will never find a direct connection with a dealer themselves. In my experience these people complain relentlessly about their position in the food chain but never actually want to change it. There was a kid whose name had gotten saved as “Twentynine Palms” in my phone. I had saved the number of somebody who had land for sale in the town of that name and accidentally fused the contacts while high.

We got into a routine where he would call me, come pick me up and drive me over to my dealer who had already separated his purchase into his piece and my cut. We would talk about anxieties over recent political events on these drives: the prescient fear that the election of Donald Trump would lead directly to a repeal of the landmark case of Roe v. Wade. He would also talk about missing his family and how none of them could accept or understand his use:

“I’m all by myself out here and heroin feels like a warm hug!”

Toward the end he would start to constantly complain about needing to give me a cut. He would make vague threats about recognizing my plug’s car and hanging around the neighborhoods he served to try to establish a primary connection. When we left town for a bit I actually did get the guy to agree to have his number passed along and see Twenty Nine Palms without me. I learned on a subsequent visit that he had never actually called. Despite his complaints it had been about his connection with me and having someone to talk to the entire time.

Another one of my middles was this guy from Malibu who drove and lived in a special van for grooming dogs. Him and his vehicle smelled disgusting – like freshly drained canine anal glands. We didn’t have the same friendly relationship and got into a protracted battle of ripping each other off. He bought a gram and I bulked it up with squished brown bread after taking too much. He sold me a “chunk” of dope that was actually a piece of heroin soaked cotton.

The last time I saw him I had accidentally bought fentanyl and nearly died trying to use it. I took the tiniest shot in our van outside of a needle exchange and ended up needing three full shots of Narcan to revive me. We were only carrying one but thankfully LaPorsha was able to run inside and get a volunteer to come help. I avoided the stuff like the plague after this but he had begun actively seeking it out. I guess he was ahead of the curve as it seems to be the only thing on the streets now.

I just now realized that this final transaction probably left him nervously looking over his shoulder because it was the only time I ever sold him exactly what was advertised at the proper price without tricks or subterfuge. I just wanted to unload the fentanyl so I could use the money I’d spent on it to buy tar somewhere.

Once we started parking the van near the methadone clinic and dosing on a daily basis we became involved with the surrounding community of mostly homeless patients. The neighborhood was full of alleys and close to the 10 Freeway providing plenty of areas to setup camps and park vehicles. LaPorsha often commented that methadone clinics and the surrounding ecosystem of their patients seemed to be some of the only places completely devoid of racial hierarchy or privilege. When everybody’s a homeless drug addict it doesn’t make that much difference what your skin color is.

There was this one shorter woman who went to the Clinic who seemed to have the maximum amount of hips and ass that can be achieved without some kind of body modifying surgery. She would dress in neon spandex bodysuits with a leather jacket and always dragged along her straight looking boyfriend who didn’t seem to dose or use other drugs. She would shoot up something in the bathroom, I’m assuming it was heroin and cocaine, and come out hellbent on humiliating and emasculating her boyfriend:

“Oh Freddy… You’re such a child!”

There was something about her body language and the way she pronounced the name Freddy that made him look like he felt like he was about three inches tall. She would flirt mercilessly with the male patients but not me as I was always with LaPorsha. I end up getting hit on in front of her in spaces involving our white culture friends and punk/art/noise circles but never in these methadone clinics. It’s a cultural thing. People don’t constantly ask me if she’s trans the moment she’s out of earshot in the clinics either.

Our clinic was funded by a county program instead of Medi-Cal so all of us were technically supposed to go to meetings. It was basically a business though so they made sure we could keep dosing even if we refused to go. I’ve never been into the twelve step thing but these meetings seemed to be especially bad for anyone that was actually interested in getting sober. Few people looked higher than the guys who would be picking up their 90 Day or Five Year Chip and it seemed to be a lot more than a heroic dose of Methadone.

There was one counselor named Diego who was especially uptight about trying to chase everyone to the meetings. He was covered in tattoos and wore the black framed boxy glasses of an aging hardcore scene dude. He drove a VW Beetle done up in Dune Buggy fashion with the little yellow happy faces over the lights on top. He dressed in button ups and awkwardly pleated slacks and constantly gave off hall monitor energy. Even after months of clearly showing that we wouldn’t go to meetings and the program had no intention of cutting us off he would call out vague threats about it every time we left.

Everybody got assigned a counselor they had to meet with once a month or so for as long as they were dosing. Everybody said more or less the same thing:

“Lord, don’t let them fuck around and give me Diego.”

We could miss three days in a row and after that we would have to do the whole intake thing again. The process took hours, you’d have to show up at five am to ensure that you’d actually be able to dose that day. There was a blood draw but that wasn’t even the worst part. The worst part was the ever present threat that they might finally assign you Diego.

Our van broke down and we parked it in front of an abandoned house. That was fine for months until an older saditty Black lady got pissed off about her husband trying to peek into the van to see LaPorsha changing. Of course she was mad at LaPorsha and not her husband. Suddenly the van was getting tickets on a weekly basis. We had to sell it for scrap before it just got towed. We moved into a tent in the alley. I made a platform out of wooden loading pallets and strung a line across the tops of two discarded Christmas Trees to hang a layer of rainproof plastic sheeting.

We started spending more time out of town, looking for an RV, going to the desert.

We got sick of coming in at five am and rolling the Diego dice.

We stopped going to the clinic.