Are You Happy

Are You Happy?





“Are you happy? I am man…” Layne murmurs into my ear from a heroin high through my new moldable earphones while the down-tuned guitar wailing helps to drown out traffic. Best Buy doesn’t need these babies. They make enough money.  I need to listen to my tunes. I turn up the volume and turn the corner from the open street into a dark alley where I can be alone. This way, I can be away from all those people moving around to their destinations, like ants, oblivious to one another. None of them care. I walk past a dumpster with wet newspapers hanging out of it. I catch a headline before squatting on the other side, careful not to sit all the way down and get the seat of my pants soaked.

It’s been raining for days and everything is wet, but not clean. Not here. Nothing in Gary is ever clean. My legs start to get tired and I take off my backpack and sit on it, kicking a wet, nasty McDonald’s bag out of the way first. The song changes and I realize what the headline I’d seen actually said. Grunge singer dies at 34 from drug overdose. I already knew that, it happened a couple weeks ago, but it hit home now. I’m listening to a dead man.

I close my eyes for a minute and try to shake the idea. It’s depressing, I think, to dwell on it. It’s depressing to think. I rummage in my pockets for the reason I had to find a dark alley in the first place. I get out the baggie and my pipe, the glass yellow and clouded. It used to be clear, clear as a glass of filtered water. I’m so thirsty. I decide to get something to drink later and shake a rock into my palm. When it’s in the pipe, hot and already sending the shit to my lungs, I lean back and don’t care anymore if my back is wet and dirty, don’t care anymore that I’m thirsty.



I close my eyes.



I’m startled back to reality when he sits down next to me, pale and gaunt, with a faint odor of human waste. I think I recognize him, but I recognize everyone high. He nudges me and I realize that he said something, but I couldn’t hear it. Why couldn’t I hear it? He nudges me again. Oh. I pull the earphones out and he repeats himself.

“Hey man, what are you doing out here?” says the same voice I’ve been listening to for the last… Has it been an hour? It’s not the same though, not quite. This voice sounds more gravely, more tired. “I’m not doin’ nothin’, man,” I tell him and feel for my pipe. He holds it up and says, “Nothin’?”

“Well, just that, but you know, that’s nothin’,” I slur.

“Yeah, nothin’,” he says slowly, in that same tired voice. I notice his face looks kinda green. His hand clenches around my pipe and he throws it across the alley where it shatters against the cold bricks on the other side. I stare at it for a minute, stuck unbelieving, like somebody put me on pause. Then I turn back to him and say, “Hey, what the fuck did you do that for, man?” and go to swat him, you don’t go and break somebody’s pipe like that… but he’s gone. I look all around and finally down to where he was sitting. There’s that same soggy newspaper, with that same sad headline.