i wanted to write since i haven’t written as consistently as i was a few months ago, and i need the practice. I also wanted to distract myself from how shitty i feel.
I took this newly sober guy to Bellevue hospital today for a doctor’s appointment. he has limited mobility and Bellevue hospital is notoriously slow and inefficient, the thing was I was sitting in the lobby for a few hours listening to Smashing Pumpkins and The Beatles and drinking pretty good coffee.
Bellevue Hospital is a city hospital in lower Manhattan on first avenue and east 27th street. It is a boiling cauldron of human misery that I am very very familiar with. when I was out there on the streets destroying myself as a shambling, mentally and emotionally vacant, piss-stinking corpse it was a common occurrence for me to end up in the emergency room at Bellevue. fun fact: the NYC department of corrections utilizes the services of this fine hospital for the medical care of all of their inmates. so not only are there severe trauma cases coming in all the time and people having uniquely NYC-style schizo-effective freakouts, there are scary people chained to hospital beds guarded by scarier corrections officers with steel batons and pistols on their belts. I hadn’t set foot in the building since getting off the streets at the end of last summer…I was having some kind of anxious post-traumatic discomfort being there, and I had to be there for 2 and a half hours.
All of the sudden in the lobby where I was minding my own business a man approached me, leaned into my ear, and said “I got some bread, you wanna go smoke some hard”. for the uninitiated, hard is New York City slang for crack cocaine. I just responded with “Nah, that never goes well”. this encounter is notable for a few reasons, and I’m not trying to give myself a pat on the back, here. I cannot take responsibility for doing what Nancy Reagan told everyone to do (fuck the Reagans, though). I was guided by some kind of energy. Today, I happen to be seriously emotionally bent out and vulnerable for several reasons that I will avoid fully describing at this time (too painful), I do think something intervened on my behalf, but I do. Here I am: emotionally wrecked from the passing of a close friend, trying to recover from a random act of emotional romance terrorism (love bombing), and post-traumatic stress, and I turn down free drugs. Something like that is enough to make a cynic like me think about the powers of the universe.
when you have been smoking crack, and you are really struggling to continue smoking crack (as is the nature of crack smoking), absolutely no one is offering you free crack. it is only when you are clean that the free crack becomes available…like where was this free crack individual 6 months ago?
free crack…it’s an oxymoron… there’s no such thing as free crack, it’s paid for in chunks of your soul.
