Queer God Worship: Dismembered Memory
“where my life was threatened at the point of an X-Acto knife”
Fiction by Brian Tibbetts
+++
The same day that my girlfriend “Anileka” and I quit the program by dropping acid in Tweaker Park, my Aunt Doris may have been dismembered by a rampaging ice cream truck. I can’t be sure. But, this is what I remember about that:
Leka and I met for the first time at the ten o’clock Friday night Narcotics Anonymous meeting at St. Stephen’s Episcopal on 13th Avenue in SW Portland. We were both teenage drug addicts, after a fashion. She was a half-Japanese, bulimic ex-model who favored crystal, back when it was still called crystal. I was a multi-year inhalant aficionado, who took occasional side trips to a land called LSD and smoked my weight in weed every month or so throughout high school.
I was looking around the NA meeting, bored to death with whoever was sharing whatever from the podium, at least I think it was a podium meeting back in those days, and there she was. Dressed in an outfit that was equal parts City Nightclub meets The Metro, and what seemed to be a jappaned leather tribute to the band Poison, Leka turned toward me as I gawked at her, looked me dead in the eye and winked. We spoke briefly after the meeting, but I don’t recall our conversation actually going anywhere.
In those days I earned my money as a graveyard short order cook at a 24-hour diner in Northwest Portland. She would come in and sit at the counter and watch me work. When I could sneak a second, I’d come over and chat her up. We were friends. I was attracted to her, but dense enough in those days that I somehow didn’t equate her near-nightly appearances at our counter as a sign that she was interested in anything more than my conversation.
On one of my days off that summer, the two of us went for a hike, returning to my apartment at the Barker Arms, across the street from JT’s Gypsy. We were laying on my futon, bullshitting about something when the phone rang. It was my mother.
As my mom and I caught up on the phone, how my sister was doing, how Granny was getting along now that they were living together in the wake of Grandad’s death, Leka pulled my shirt off me and motioned for me to lie face down on the bed. She started rubbing my back. It was not the first time she’d given me a massage, so I thought little of it, continuing my conversation with my mother. But after a few minutes, I began to feel Leka’s lips brushing against my shoulders as she continued to rub my lower back. Then she paused for a moment, pulled her hands and lips away from me, and when they returned I could feel the tips of her nipples brushing lightly against my skin. I asked my mother if I could call her back.
Leka and I fucked for the first time that afternoon, making enough noise to prompt one of my neighbors to shout out, “close the fucking windows already.” Later that month she moved in. That fall we started doing drugs together.
I’d been sober for the better part of three years when we met. Leka was relatively new to the program. Our relationship is what the experienced sometimes referred to as “thirteenth-stepping” someone, in that I was experienced in sober culture and the ways of the steps, while she was fresh and still looking for a substitute for drugs, and that rather than work the twelve steps, we’d decided to pour our chances at long-term sobriety into fucking away our problems.
Regardless of our experience level in the program, Leka and I shared the sentiment that participating in the culture of Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous was alright, and maybe was helping us to deal with some pretty major shit in our lives, but that neither of us really had a problem with drugs and alcohol, per se. We were just taking a break to get our heads straight, distancing ourselves from our go-to coping behaviors long enough to develop some healthier habits, or some other happy horseshit like that.
Regardless, within the first three months of our relationship, it became clear that neither of wanted, or felt that we needed to stay sober much longer. The question shifted from if we go out, to how we’d go out.
I’d relapsed before. After two years of initial sobriety, I’d spent a week drinking heavily with a couple of ex-skinheads who’d recanted their racist ways, along with drinking and drugs, but who later on went to prison for assaulting or murdering someone. I can’t be sure.
We’d seen others relapse, and come crawling back, tails between their legs as well. Leka and I wanted to make sure that we emphatically left the program. So we set aside any pretentions to normalcy that we may have held, and decided to leave the program by dropping LSD.
On the night in question, we walked downtown from our apartment and scored acid off one of Leka’s old contacts, this guy Rainbow who sold out of Tweaker Park, that little one-block park sandwiched between the justice center and the Portland building.
We dropped, as we walked away from the park and came on sitting on the stairs of Leka’s old Catholic girl’s school, St. Mary’s Academy. We sat there in the falling dark and watched the street light shadows chase the leaves around the bricks, talking about everything and nothing, the way you always do on acid.
After between twenty minutes and several hours of this, we got a little bored and a little paranoid, and decided that it was time to make the journey from St. Mary’s back through Downtown to our apartment in Northwest. The problem was, we realized that there were many possible venues for running into people we did not want to see in the state we were in, particularly because up until between twenty minutes and several hours before, we’d been members of a not-so-anonymous subculture that we’d chosen to turn our backs on.
So, like we were trying to plan an escape route that guaranteed we wouldn’t be picked up on any surveillance cameras, we plotted our twenty-some block walk home so that we’d be sure to avoid running into anyone who might have known us sober. Oh to be twenty years old and assuredly self-important again.
What should have been a twenty-minute walk home, ended without incident something like an hour and a half later. We ended up cross-legged on the living room floor, staring unblinking into each other’s eyes through the flame of a taper, listening to the Gyoto Monk’s Tibetan Tantric Choir. Because, who doesn’t listen to music at least partially composed on drums and rattles made of human bones and skulls, while fake meditating, really fucking high on LSD?
This went on for some hours.
The sun started acting like it was going to come up.
The phone rang.
I answered it.
It was my mother again.
She was very sorry. Yesterday, it seems my great-aunt Doris was struck and killed by a rampaging ice cream truck, barreling down Circle Boulevard in Corvallis. She was hit with such force the her body flew apart, and her head came to a rolling stop at the curb, there at the bend in Circle just past the Corvallis Aquatic Center, where I used to take swim lessons, next door to Highland View Junior High School where I attended sixth through eighth grades, where my life was threatened at the point of an X-Acto knife by a recently immigrated second cousin of the Shah of Iran.
I must’ve sounded upset.
She let me get off the phone.
I eventually got some sleep.
Later that week, I drove the ninety minutes from Northwest Portland to the McHenry Funeral Home in Corvallis for yet another funeral. I said goodbye to Aunt Doris, Granny’s sister. Her frail, dismembered, body hid from view by the closed lid of her coffin. I remembered her filter-less Pall Malls, and the time when I was seven or eight and I tried to freak her out by putting Fourth of July Pop-Its behind the back tire of her Ford.
It only occurred to me years later that I never confirmed what I’m pretty sure my mother told me regarding the circumstances of Doris’s death. By then it mattered even less whether it was an ice cream truck or not, whether she flew apart or not. The pictures in my head are no less vivid for their root in whichever reality.
+ + +
