[ HOME ]

[ writings ]

[ biography ]

[ gay ferret ]

[ gay daily news ]

[ DREAMWalker Group ]

[ my great store ]

[ Promisetown Tales ]

[ Links ]

[ email me ]

Site designed by
DREAMWalker Group

My lover sat across from me, his head lolling first to the left, then to the right. His Irish skin a raspberry red, yet somehow pale and sickly too. The tendons in his neck stood out like reeds, the way they always stood out when he’d drunk way too much and was about to become a monster. Suddenly, his eyes flared up and rolled toward the top of his head. A small amount of froth appeared at his lips.

Abruptly, he wretched and his body reeled forward. He fell off the chair and lay on the floor. I watched him with disgust.

I got up and went into the kitchen to light a cigarette and make another cocktail. And while I was at it, I grabbed two Valium from their case and washed them down with Seagram's Seven. In the other room, I could hear my lover coughing. I hated him more than anyone would ever know.

When I went back inside, he had vomited on the carpet. "You damn moron," I said aloud … not to him because he was beyond hearing. Except that he suddenly became stiff, at least his body did, and his eyes flew open. "Mike," he snarled, "Call a doctor." I looked at him with disgust in my eyes, written on my face. "What," I said to him, "Did you say?"

"Call a doctor." Then he vomited again, this time all over his own shirt.

"Will you stop puking!" I said.

"I can’t," he said teary-eyed and suddenly sounding very far away.

"What’s wrong with you" I said with extreme fatigue in my voice.

"Mike," he said, his voice thick with chemicals, "I’m overdosing. I took a bottle of pills."

"What are you talking about?" I said. But he was gone.

My lover’s body fell backward, his head smashing hard on the wooden floor.

Suddenly the phone rang. It was his ex lover, Charles, calling. "Let me talk to him," he said. "You can’t," I told Charles and then proceeded to describe the scene in my apartment.

‘My God," Charles hollered over the phone, "You have to get him into the shower and run cold water over him!"

"I can’t do that" I told Charles, "He’s too heavy."

"You have to try, Charles said, "Or else he could die! For God’s sake, we don’t even know what he’s taken!"

So I hung up the phone and dragged his body into the bathroom. While getting him into the bathtub, I managed to knock his head a few more times on the porcelain. Finally, him situated and looking like a corpse, I turned on the cold water, letting it run down his face and into his mouth and eyes.

The phone rang; it was Charles again. "You have to light a cigarette and start burning his hands" What are you talking about, I screamed. "I’m telling you, I know what I’m talking about!! You have to inflict pain so that he’ll remain conscious. If he passes out, we’ll lose him!"

I hung up the phone and proceeded to burn my lovers hands with a cigarette. When Charles called the next time, the bathroom smelled like a barbecue. "Now," Charles told me, "Fill the tub with cold water and keep slapping his face!"

I did what Charles said, the cold water numbing my hands and doing God only knew what to my lover. When the tub was full, I propped his body up against the porcelain side and left the room. Sitting in the living room, it occurred to me that my lover might slip under the water and die. That he really was close to dying.

I lit a cigarette and pensively thought about that, only half listening for the sound of him going under water. The thought buzzed around the inside of my head like a knat. When, after several minutes that sound did not come, I went in to the bathroom and dragged his lifeless, but breathing, body into the living room. Sitting there and watching him while waiting for Charles to call back or show up in person, I realized that the excitement of my lover’s near death experience was taking the edge off the Valium and Seagram’s Seven. In other words, he was killing my high.

At that moment I felt the slightest tinge of remorse when I realized that my high was more important to me than saving this pathetic fool’s life. The following morning, and for years to come, I would regret not letting the bastard die.

Copyright © 1999 by Michael Walker

Michael Walker is a freelance writer in Washington, DC.  He is also the founder and proprietor of DREAMWalker Group.