Edge

                                                                              -n-o-w-
         Some people call it living on the edge.  I just call it living dirty.  Being what everyone else isn't.  Dirty, underground, vicious, and stale.  My life consists of stained bathroom walls, the smell of cigarettes, the touch of salty sweat-dirt mix to clean skin.  People think it's easy, to be this way, to never care.  But as a wasteful human, it's the hardest to leave behind every tinge of emotion and just focus on now, physically, what is happening.  I live on the streets.  Everyday I see people on the rim of madness, about to drown.  People who have nothing and didn't choose to be so.  Things that just exist, tortured.  Things that are desolate.  So yeah, I'd say it's not easy, it's the hardest fucking thing I've ever done. And I live it.
                                                           -m-e-m-o-r-y-                                                  
         Ah, where do I start.  I don't even remember my parents.  I ran away at nine with a 20 year old cousin addicted to heroin.  I had no idea what I was doing.  I thought I was smart.  And I am, I suppose.  At nine I had the understanding of a normal sixteen year old.  Teachers called me brilliant.  And my parents, my white collar, cul-de-sac, pretentious soccer parents, they basked in it.  Despite my intelligence, childish innocence trumped most of my common decisions. But it was all so uniform. Everyday I did the same thing.  I took little joy in the small things kids that age should love, like juice boxes and colorful TV.  It seemed like such a gift to just get in the car with a living, breathing, twisted story.  A stranger.  And so we went.  Carlen was her name, and she was constantly high on whatever dust she could find, prescription, designer, street. Carlen fascinated me and scared me.  She had a car and enough money to live, but not to settle. She had no purpose.  She offered to share her root beer with me, soda I wasn’t allowed to have.  It had to have been in that car for weeks, stale and hot.  I closed my mouth around the straw and the carbonation stung my tongue.  Even now I remember the taste.  I guess you could say I was abducted, but it wasn’t an abduction.  We made it across the country, to the urban part of New York.  I didn’t plan for it to be forever, or for anything to even happen, but I was naive, a child.  Kept thinking we would come back.  In the city, a tiny apartment with a stained mattress on the floor. I didn't go to school, but I learned.  I learned anything worth learning.  Carlen spent her days on the street, strung out.  She could cook though, I'll give her that.  I ate baked chicken but drank dirty water.  Everyday I went out, to the streets, and experienced.  I met business men and homeless people alike in my wanderings, and I took an interest in people.  This was how I grew up.  Suddenly, I was doing something new and fulfilling everyday.  It went on like this for years, until I found Carlen covered in rats and flies, her as a story shattered with a needle in her arm.  ODed at 23. So I left, what else could I do?  I had nothing. 
                                                                           -n-o-w-
         It's been a long night.  The street side is cold and the grit of gravel sticks to my exposed thighs.  My feet bleed and burn in my ridiculous shoes, and my hair is greasy.  But it's Saturday and the lonely men are out and the bad side of the city is pulsing with a dull, writhing energy.  Neon lights and car horns, leather skirts and red fingernails, this is what I am.  Throughout my career as a escort; I see the same type of men.  Men of all ages willing to pay high dollar for my momentary intimacy.  It seems beautiful to me sometimes, but mostly painful.  I need the money though.  I've been everything. A stripper, a hooker, a bartend, a fast food slave, the other woman.  But mostly I just exist.  Pain won't kill me, just make me more alive.  I am indifferent. I have no one. 
         I light another cigarette and stand up as I see headlights turning my corner.  There's a sharp stabbing between my legs when I walk but I ignore it, once more.  The sedan pulls up to me with screeching brakes.  The mans eyes are dark and wide set, and he offers me 300 dollars for the rest of the night.  I need a place to stay tonight, so I slide in next to him.  He has a large forehead. 
         "What's your name?" I say in a sultry voice, disgusting myself. 
         "You can call me George, and I have cash." He is confident, he has done this before. He wants me to shut up but I am curious. 
         "What's your story?" 
         "I'm horny" he says bluntly, and I know to stop talking, his mouth is too quick and I don’t want violence.  He takes me to a lower middle class apartment.  It is cluttered.  While I remove my ragged shorts and tank top, I look at his end table.  Pills, water, a dim lamp.  This man is boring, and his wife has clearly left him long ago. But he's breathing money, a place to sleep.  I stretch out on the light blue bed sheets and remove my heels.  My clothes are in a pile in the corner and by tomorrow morning, all traces that I've been here will be gone.  Elusive and lost.  “George” leans down next to me and I murmur 
         “Whatever you want." into his neck.  He pushes his hand on the inside of my thigh and my mind drifts away to something else, momentarily numbing that thick sting.                                         
                                                                                      -m-e-m-o-r-y-
         I hadn’t been home for a week the night I found Carlen.  We came and went as we pleased.  I barged into the one-room apartment with a backpack full of colored glass pieces I had collected on the streets with a stoner named Evan.  I was sucking a popsicle he had stolen from someone’s basement for me and I even had a couple pills for Carlen to crush.  These always made her happy.  The apartment was eerily still.  As usual the mess and musk of never having been cleaned was settled over everything, drizzled with the thick, sloppy heat of summer.  But the room smelled.  I knew this smell.  The smell of death, I having no doubt experienced it a distance seemed to float in the air.  I fell to my knees beside her body tracing my fingers along faded scars on her arm, searching for a pulse.  But I knew she was dead, there were too many creatures looting her body for her not to be.  How awful it was for whatever life she could pass on to be passed on to insects and vermin.  All of the sudden I was angry at the flies, the rats. 
         “Leave!“ I shouted, choking back tears.  Why should they get to savor what they could of her, I couldn’t have her back.  I imagined they were the ones who took her life.  I had seen death, but never this close, this personal.  I dumped the glass from my book bag onto her chest.  I no longer wanted the pieces, no longer wanted Evan or this day, only what I could salvage.  I pulled a half empty bottle of Percocet and a wad of cash from Carlen’s purse.  Not much else in there, cigartte ashes and aluminum foil, keys to a car that stopped working long ago and a sudged fake ID.  I could sell these pills, I had to get away.  A change of clothes, a search for food that wasn’t in the house.  I breath deep in the doorway with my hand on the door, hardening my thoughts against tears.  Looked over Carlen’s body once more,  Scabbed, scarred, dirty, skinny, unused in death as well as life.  Life oft ends in death, and how quickly.


         After I had left the body of Carlen I roamed the blocks around the apartment, sleeping under eaves and eating one meal a day from assorted homeless shelter.  As much as I hated her drug use, I missed her. She was my replacement mother, cooking for me and teaching me to sell almost anything, including my body, now that I couldn‘t remember my real mother.  I missed her smug smile and her chestnut colored hair that was often carefully cleaned but forgotten on a crack binge.  Carlen had always been clean, as clean as you can be as an addict.  As smart as I was, it was getting colder, and I would have to find some kind of residence.  This is what indirectly led me to Aiden. 
         Purposelessness left me aimlessly walking down one of the deepest gang parts of town.  It had been days since I had eaten and I prayed for a stray bullet to catch me, to put me out of my misery.  I crouched in the corner of an abandoned warehouse, prepared to stay for the night, when I heard the window crash open.  I shuffled deeper into the corner.  I could see my breath in the cold.  And that’s where I lost my memory, my semblances of innocence, everything.  A sharp bang against my head with a fist.  A sharp push between my legs with pain.  There was hot blood, and my limbs were sticky. Wandering hands, and then a wandering junkie wandered. away.  He didn’t even know what he had done, neither did I.  The exploding rockets in my head implored me, sit, sleep, forget in the corner of that dusty cold warehouse.


I was tall at 5' 7" but the figure that slit the morning shadows in the building was a good bit over six feet.  Black man much older than I with beefy muscles.  He bent down in front of me.  "What's your name, girl?" he says, pushing my chin up with his fist.  I couldn’t answer.  What he saw there was pitiful.  Tall, skinny, pale white girl.  12 or 13 years old.  Black hair and a thin nose.  On the edge of death.  Dirty, so dirty, and weak enough to not fight him picking her up and slinging her over her shoulder.  I was a waste of air by then.  He carried my lifeless cold figure all the way back to his home.  Through my painful haze I smelled eggs and potatoes. The only time I've ever seen Aiden cook, and I was barely alive enough to understand it.  He was bringing me back.  Why he didn't let me die, I'll never know.  I was fed without a fight, the food too hot but enough,.  “Carlen?“  He laid me to sleep in his large expensive bed and once again I was forgetting. 
         I woke up the next morning in his bed, alone.  Street adrenaline kicked in.  Where was I?  Why couldn’t I remember anything?  And the pain. The pain was overwhelming.  I flushed back onto the pillow. I smelled and I was sticky.  I knew what the sticky was, I didn’t want to touch it, wanted it to go away. Carlen, the pills in my backpack, the sting of a punch to my head.  I tiptoed into the kitchen in my disgusting clothes, largely confused.  Aiden sat in the kitchen, weighing out large bags of drugs.  This man was black but not dark, light skinned with tattoos snaking up his arms and he was even taller than  had imagined.  He glared at me. "You smell like shit, take a shower." I jumped because he had spoken without turning around, his orders sharp and almost angry, but not quite.  Non-descript bathroom, non-descript bedroom and kitchen, this was not his only home.  Hot water slid down my dirty body, and I stood there, my muscles unwinding.  I thought in the shower, where was my book bag and clothes? What could I take when I leave to pawn?  What did he want from me?  When I came out of the bathroom he was there, tossing a pair of his sweatpants and a tiny woman‘s tank top at me.  He left and I slid on the clothes, all too big.  Who was this man? Why did he bring me in like this? What would he do to me?
         Back in the kitchen, I have a barrage of questions, each answered with a one word grunt. “What time is it?” “2 pm” “where are we” “my apartment”
         Aiden “Kooky” Jackson was a drug lord, a gangster god, a ruler of the ghetto.  He was quiet, smart, two steps ahead of you, a loner.  He made his living selling cocaine and earning respect.  His business went down in day and his deals in night.  I learned this by watching.  Every day I watched him measure, sell.  That dusty white powder that would practically control my life for the next 6 years. 
         That second day, I stayed in the bedroom.  I stared hard at every item. Lamp, bed sheets, window.  Dresser with incredibly well tailored shirts in it.  Bookshelf.  More than anything that physically filled the room, the sound of silence overtook all.  It drove me insane, slightly, in those few hours. I stared.  I listened.  Aiden worked carefully, with no sound.  The sound of no sound.  Of nothing.  Hard as I tried, Aiden would not talk.  Wouldn’t admit to having me here.  I couldn’t stay here, living nothing.  I fixed again on the window.  This apartment was only two floors up.  I could fall that far, but it would hurt.  I stared down to the sidewalk below.  I thought about falling, jumping.  But there was a better way.  I spent a couple minutes tying and twirling the expensive bed sheets into a rope.  “How ghetto” I thought as I tied it to the fire escape, “How ironic”.  Escaping from the thing that had saved me, because I wanted more.  More of what?
         Scaling the brick side wall was harder than I had expected. It led off into an alley, but there were rusty iron bolts and pieces of a fallen fire escape.  A fire escape would’ve been nice.  I was weaker than I thought, and the building was taller than I’d estimated.  “Fuck.  Fuck!”  The iron attachments and the brick made my feet bleed and I was loosing grip.  Aiden was at the window, looking at me with amusement.  “Fuck you!” His smile was condescending.  He lifted the rope off the sill, hanging with me on it, with one arm.  Gently, I was pulled into the window.  Rage bubbled over.  I gritted my teeth and he said “oh please.” “FUCK YOU!” I screamed again.  I tasted his blood in my mouth as I bit and kicked at him.  He shoved me off hard and I landed in the corner.  Pain shoots through my head again and I bite back tears.  “You really don’t want to go back out there.  You can leave if you want but I don’t intend to hurt you. “
         “I can’t trust someone who won’t even answer my questions..”, softening my resolve.  This was the most words he had said since he’ picked me up…he’d picked me up.  I remembered Carlen, the streets, the disgusting, rapist junkie, the food and the bed all at once.  I tried to remember my parents, but I couldn’t.  Or much else.  Aiden crouches beside me and touches my cheek.  His fingers are rough and he looks older, closer up.  I can’t help but focus on his eyes.  They’re hazel backed by a dull grey and tiny.  Crow’s feet, or rather the beginnings of what might be crow’s feet trickle along the corners of the eyelids.  What really got me is the loneliness, the gray and blue swirling in a concrete poem that moaned for human company.  He smiled a big smile and said “Fuck you, too.”
                                                                         
tbc-leave revies plz!