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Jared
Lindell
Porcelain Pedestal |
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The toilet seat is the natural perch of the heroin addict. A vantage point from which one can see nothing but walls, and the only road out is through one's own veins. A depraved sanctuary for the most wretched form of human being: the Junkie.
"I hate that word.'' This sentiment, blurted out a few nights earlier, had shattered a night of light-hearted conversation, and shrouded the evening in an uneasy tension when my friend Matt had cracked that he was a "total caffeine junkie.'' It was at that moment I realized that our friend Bridget, who had gone to Seattle composed of leather and grit, had come back a porcelain doll, a fragile ego to be handled with care.
I stood in a narrow hall, listening to the rap music coming from the stereo in the living room and the shower running on the other side of a plywood door. Matt knocked on the door three times with the authority of a prison warden. "Are you ok in there?'' The door rattled virulently against its frame, drowning out the sound of each knock with its clamor.
"Come in! I'm dressed!'' Her voice was shaky and weak, and the cheery inflection in her speech was obviously forced. If I had not seen Bridget go into the bathroom by herself earlier, I would have thought that she was being held captive behind that flimsy door with a knife to her throat.
The knob jiggled as Matt turned it, and the door wobbled open, squealing on its hinges. The static hiss of the shower seemed to magnify as the sound ricocheted off the bathroom walls and streamed out into the darkened apartment, temporarily drowning out the music. For a second it seemed like the universe outside Bridget's bathroom had ceased to exist.
Bridget's bathroom was typical of cheap, cramped apartments everywhere. The walls were the yellowish, off-white color of smoke resin. Hazy droplets of hard water, condensation from when the shower was still hot, accumulated and streamed down a beige polyester shower curtain adorned with alternating rows of blue ducks and green frogs. A hazy yellow light emanated from a frosted glass lampshade which hung on a wall above a partially fogged over mirror.
Bridget sat cross-legged
on the toilet, clasped hands resting on an unshaven thigh. "A porcelain
pedestal for a porcelain doll," I thought. This was not quite a doll
I was looking at, this was more of a statue; one sculpted from real flesh
and poorly weathered. She stayed perfectly still as we entered the room,
moving only her eyes to look at the dingy green carpet where the droplets
of water had streamed down the shower curtain and soaked into hundreds
of tiny puddles. She wore a faded red, scratchy-looking hemp turtleneck
on her torso and below that only a pair of plaid boxers, out from which
grew two hairy, colorless legs. She wore no visible
jewelry except for a badly chewed plastic candy-ring on her left ring
finger. Her hair had just recently been dyed and permed and was still
bone dry. In fact, it appeared not to have been washed in weeks. Curly
red locks stuck to her forehead and the back of her neck, pasted there
with grease and sweat. Red hair combined with the black eye shadow, together
with the black circles under her eyes, created a trendy neo-Persian look;
it almost would have made her buyable as a run-of-the-mill Seattle raver,
had it not been for her pale purple lips and the massive bags under her
eyes.
Matt pushed back the shower curtain, revealing an antique iron bathtub
painted white with four legs and a thick brown ring around the inside.
He grasped the silver knobs on each side of the spout and turned them
in opposite directions to finally cease the racket of the shower, which
had been running for just under two hours. The rap music on the stereo
had changed into some bizarre kind of R&B. I heard lyrics that went
something like, ''Don't go aw-way. Don't you dare go away from me, gi-irrl."
Bridget looked up at us, trying hard to look defiant, and said, "I don't want to hear it, you guys. I've heard it enough.''
James started on some "get yourself together'' lecture at scolding volume, and Bridget came back with whatever bullshit she could muster. I wasn't listening. Instead, I tried to find some trace of the strong and independent Bridget of the old days. Her eyes were empty; they looked like the windows of a vacated house whose previous owners had taken the curtains when they left. Bridget's spirit had left long ago, flown out through the eyes and gone to wherever the next hit was. It was already there by this time, at some Seattle junk dealer's house. It only had to wait for the sluggish body to catch up so that it could commence with its selfish ritual. I imagined a newspaper article with a picture of the spirit with a rope around the statue's head, a jack hammer chipping away at its ankles. The caption reads, "Finally, after years of struggle, Bridget's soul declares independence.''