There is a barroom down the street from my house. When it's warm the people smoke inside and drink out front. The men slam little ounces of gin and heave the plastic bottles on the ground. Really it's a pretty impotent gesture but they're so many sheets to the wind by the time it's OK to drink on the sidewalk that they do it with the power of working. Of Jupiter. Or maybe it's just the least fucked up part of the whole scene such that it's perversity is ignored in favor of say--that guy puking on the stroller. I guess the ground in North Philly could be Elysian Fields to someone. Depending on how many drinks were in them. Those little bottles certainly glint like lightning when they catch the BP sign half a block east.
Sometimes I go into the bar which we'll just call Tabula Rasa and smoke in there. I used to buy heroin from a guy named JB who sat in the back and was the only person who smoked more than me. They really do a terrible job of concealing that it's a trap in there. They blast Young Jeezy and likeminded bad men so loudly you can't think. I used to wonder why it was so loud even when it was just me and JB in there staring at each other on a Monday and then I realized it's because they want precisely no one to have to be accountable for what they say. Recorded or not. Drugs make you paranoid because you have to deal with other paranoid people in order to get the drugs to mitigate your paranoia.
There was a 20 year old girl who liked me a lot when I was frequenting Tabula Rasa everyday. She was born in Honduras but raised in South Philly. Her name was Ana Cristina. To be honest that whole time period is pretty much a blur to me--both then and now--but I was moved by the sight of her. She was minuscule--I mean really really small. I don't typically go for smaller girls. And she wasn't beautiful in a shocking way. Though all 20 year old girls can be shockingly beautiful if they know how to do it. But she smiled so big and seemed so genuinely decent that it moved me. I felt sober by proxy. Or at least that's how I wanted to remember it at that moment. Or later on when she gave me a call to say she happened to be in my neighborhood and wanted to meet. I was pretty dubious to the notion of a girl from the middle of nowhere South Philadelphia ending up in the middle of nowhere North Philly--a place I happened to live in because of its proximity to heroin and junkyard work--but I played along. I was 23 or something at the time and so I only wanted to play games because I had nothing serious to deal with.
I told Ana Cristina to meet me at Tabula Rasa. Now--though she was actually a very genuine and kind-hearted person she was no idiot and had clearly been involved with her fair share of heavy users before. Hell--that's probably why she liked me to begin with. So when she heard that I wanted to meet at Tabula Rasa the tone in her voice got a little darkened. I guess she had heard of it before. It's possible I imagined the whole change but--like I said--I was pretty deeply embroiled in a hazy and ceaseless paranoia at the time and basically looking for reasons to be suspicious.
By the time Ana Cristina arrived I was two beers and two bags and a half pack of smokes deep. I was sitting with my back to JB who was at the back of the barroom drinking Milwaukee's Best from the blue can with the steadiest hand you've ever seen. I flipped the rest of the bundle around in my pocket feeling the rubber bands. Tabula Rasa is a single floor that's pretty commodious for such a blatant drug front. Behind the bar was Terri--who I could swear was eight months pregnant for about two years and always perched on a stool. Then like six bar stools and a patch of linoleum flooring that leads to a series of thin particleboard booths bolted to the ground and humongous windows that are western facing. The floor is a speckled beige linoleum and the back of the booths are painted red to match the tables. The bar and ledges of the windows are a false dark wood. The walls being a textured whitish stucco stained from years of cigarette smoke and neglect. I think it has white drop ceilings but they're so high up there--at least 16 feet--and I never looked up much to say definitively. There are dark fans on the ceiling but I really have no idea where the lighting comes from. There's three unisex toilet rooms in the back after the only table stool which is where JB is. Though there are no placards on the doors one of them only houses a trough with ice in it sometimes and drain connected to a hole in the middle. There are these strange tiny wooden chairs in the rooms also. Those little spindle back chairs for children. And yellow bars of soap sitting in trays by the mirrors above the sinks. The walls are covered in no smoking signs for some reason and there's also never been any graffiti in them as far as I can tell. Perhaps the only bathrooms at any bar in Philadelphia able to boast something like that. Anyway--I spent a lot of time in those bathrooms which is why I'm describing them so thoroughly.
Ana Cristina arrived and sat down. I had a beer waiting for her. We talked for a few minutes and then she left. Or maybe I fell asleep. Or asked her to leave because I was tired. I don't know. I haven't seen her since. But I've heard that she really liked me which is it's own story all together for someone else to write.
I don't think about her very often. But sometimes when I walk by Tabula Rasa now and I see JB with that same totally idealess and utilitarian presence--like a piece of furniture or traffic light--I wonder how I ever spent so much time in there. And how someone like her only spent about 20 minutes in there. She must remember that place. And the strangest part of it all--she must remember it exactly as I do. With the smoke swimming in the big western light and the bottles flitting in the cold breeze outside. The guy coughing on his life from across the other side of the haze he made.
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