HAYLEY BOYD / ANOTHER PILL, SUMMER
It was my summer of love. Men paid me in drugs. I treasured every one. Iridescent powders, glittering pills, tabs. The pill shaped like an owl, ruby red, with a sparkly sheen, that one was something else, something special.
I have always been partial to crime, to obscene acts, elaborate grifts, and unimaginable states of body and mind. Irreversible states in some cases. By the end of summer my mind was made up of several prancing bejeweled peacocks, each with a distinct homicidal agenda and apprehension. I was decoding the codings and codifying the decodings deliberately. A radical act of obscurity related to the rhythms of my bowel.
At the height of it I refused to handle cash. I only accepted ingestible, synthetic curios. I performed a variety of surfaces in unheated basement apartments. Rooms with busted toilets, sagging sofas, short ceilings, and small, peeping windows. I am bad with names and I always forget a face. I was mishandled by a man, and a week later he pulled me from the same dank bar. I realized my mistake face down. I recognized the smell of the mattress, spent semen and mold and something sickly sweet. Mercifully my postcoital treasure binge obliterated the rest of the night from memory, but I had to find a new bar.
***
Two or three nights a week I escorted myself to the bar that felt like a small, dark cave. I wore the same dress every time. A brilliantly cut emerald thing that shimmered in the darkness and clung unflatteringly or beautifully depending on taste. I got handfuls of the stuff, more than I could ever hope to take before erasing my mind or life for good. I organized my trove in a jewelry box according to appearance rather than intended effect. I do not want to know what I am going to feel from moment to moment. To know is a kind of death. Part of unknowing is delousing: detangling the brambled nest of language and expunging the word-gems. Ironically, you must clarify to reach uncertainty. Then you may soar through the clear hard transcendent space of decorporalization.
I learned this from the special pill, the sparkling ruby owl. But before that I had to hit bottom, and after I hit bottom I had to go deep underground. I was fired from the healing crystals store and dumped by the muddy-eyed man with diamond rings and capital gains. I spent my unemployment money on supplements and shimmering skin products. My landlord, a sickly window peeper scuffing the halls in a gummy bathrobe, tried to make a deal, a dirty one. I didn’t go for it but it gave me the idea.
Weeks deep into my new graft I met long haired Franz. I tripped in my heels back to his below ground place with the DayGlo posters and luminescent lava lamps. He gave me a pearl necklace. He said I got no cash for you babe, just these, and handed me a baggie of glowing blue hexagons. You can take them or sell them. I took them. I tripped and tripped and tripped in my apartment alone, and even stood out on the small patio to stare at the crystal blue sky and watch my mind soar with the tiny flitting birds. When I came to everything was rearranged. Forks and amethysts mixed up with acrylic paints and used pregnancy tests, folded towels in the oven, communist pamphlets in the cereal box. I no longer knew the difference between the sacred and the vile. From then on I only went with guys like Franz, guys who could pay in rare magic and get me stoned. Some weeks later I met another Franz, this one with even longer hair. He slipped the owl in my mouth and said this will really blow your mind.
It was like this: a hundred thousand veiled words flew from a violent wind and our bodies shattered and dispersed and transformed into raindrop-shaped diamonds sliding down a window pane that was the whole universe itself, and each one of those diamonds was something else, a cooing dove or a hard memory, or an impossible form with infinite facets shining and glittering and reflecting. I was far, far out from that underground place. Winged, etherealized, one with eternity and space.
Hayley Boyd's writing has appeared in The Masters Review, decomp, EATING IN MY HOME, and elsewhere.