Free Will Work for Drugs by Lydia Lunch Page B

he wasn’t set up and offed in some two-bit hustle, didn’t play patsy to a sleazy pickup line whispered under the breath of a serial-killing sex stalker, he didn’t stumble into a speeding car before passing out and pissing all over himself … He didn’t fall off a fire escape trying to jimmy open and pry out one of the frail old sex queens from a ratty roach-infested bed set on fire in an opium haze by a lit cigarette dropped from the limp fist of some young trick he got dope, dick, and the drips off of …
    Which he almost did, fall five stories that is, from the roof of the shitbag hotel he night watches, said he didn’t even try to catch himself, didn’t care, was ready to curse Creation and kiss the concrete, just to see how many bones would shatter, and how bad it would feel when they did, but his belt got looped around a broken rung and instead of wringing his neck, it saved his ass. And that was just last week.
    â€œIf I was a soldier, I’d trip over a land mine,” he laughs, small belly chuckle, eyes not faking too hard an innocence he still manages to maintain, and with all my might, try as I do, I just can’t decode how …
    But the beauty is, Johnny doesn’t get it either, doesn’t see it, can’t feel it, so busy dousing his wounds with Betadine, counting his scars, picking at scabs, another hairline fracture here, a small concussion there, bloody rags wrapped around the temple, soaking up the fallout from the body as battlefield to be trampled under by his big black boots …
    Storm troopers kicking the shit out of the enemy within, waging counter-offensives which will guarantee mutually assured destruction not only against himself, not only against me, but aimed directly at the shell-shocked and battle-fatigued little boy who screams for ceasefire in the bunker and wants his mother to kamikaze in to the demilitarized zone …
    That unchartered territory where a part of him still lives, the part that cowers in the far corner late at night, scared of shadows and holy ghosts, scared of losing life before figuring out exactly what it means to fucking live, and his life is an endless barrage of bullshit and petty disasters, where losing whatever it is you’re desperately trying to hold on to is not only natural but almost genetically preprogrammed, and Jesus Christ, I want to save him from himself, want to take care of him, mother him, love him, get him to love himself, be saint, savior, and favorite sin, but we’re both sick with need, sick on each other, and not a single day goes by that I don’t whisper a stupid prayer that smears God’s name to keep him safe. But he’s not safe. He’s not safe. He’s not safe from me. And I’m not safe from him.
    * * *
    Johnny crawls into bed bloody and beer-stained. He’s cut himself again. I pretend I’m still sleeping. He feels closer to me, safer, he relaxes when I’m half dead. He cradles into my coma. It calms him down, slows his blood. He presses himself against me. His thick leather belt sweats against my back. He buries his face in my hair. Inhales slowly. Supping on my dusky aroma, a dirty-white honeysuckle stained with night’s runoff. I am the oxygen he feeds upon. A cleansing hallucinogen, the undercurrent of musky heat radiates life into his open mouth. When he’s with me he can breathe again.
    I feel his excitement building. The air catches fire in his dry cottony throat. He swallows, mouths, I want so bad to love you like you pretend to love me . I tremble. Not moving. Frozen like a still frame cracked and trapped inside a broken movie projector.
    I want so bad to lash out, thrash against him, scream his name. Pound his temples. Smash him in the face. Shoot him in the fucking head. Stab his lower lip, his arms, his legs, his back and chest, cut him into a thousand crimson ribbons so that he would, for that one moment, truly comprehend just how much