Mat Johnson - Drop

Yes, they had work for me, maybe as soon as next Monday. A position with the electric company, had I answered phones before? Shit, didn’t I just answer this one? The secretary said, ‘Nine o’clock tomorrow morning we’ll get the drug screening out of the way and then we can get you out on assignment. Is that okay?’

At dinner Alex asked, ‘How did it go?’ We were sitting on her couch, putting a sheet over the two cardboard boxes that was her table. I could smell the food so I was rushing, trying to get the fabric down.

‘It’s screwed. They wanted me to take a drug test first.’

‘So what, you got First Amendment issues now? You’re clean. You’ve always been clean, don’t worry about it.’ Alex brought the plates to the table. Red, steaming, smelling of hot sauce.

‘I’ve been smoking spliff daily since I got home.’

‘What? What the hell is wrong with you? Aren’t you a little old to be acting like a jackass?’

‘Alex, you smoke pot all the time. Parmesan?’

‘I don’t eat dairy.’

‘Yeah, but you smoke a fat joint, don’t lie. What the hell is this?’

‘First of all, you’re rude. Pasta.’

‘But what kind of stuff is this?’ I asked, holding something up with my fork.

‘It’s texturized vegetable protein. It tastes just like meat.’

‘Monkey-love, if it tasted just like meat, would I be asking? You’re weird. I love you, but I think you should know this. Ain’t no tofu allowed in the ghetto, what’s wrong with you? Tell you what I’m going to do: I’m gonna go out there, climb up a tree, kill us a squirrel, a big fat gray one, and then we’re going to eat the fucker.’

‘You gotta get that job, boy,’ Alex said, slurping spaghetti strings into her ‘O’ shaped mouth, getting flicks of red across her chin and neck which she didn’t notice. I reached out and wiped them off with my thumb.

‘Take the test,’ she told me.

‘Are you crazy? I’ll fail it and then they’ll arrest me and send me upstate to Holmesburg.’

‘They don’t arrest you for stuff like that.’

‘They’ll deport me.’

‘Insane negro, this is your home.’

‘They’ll take my passport, they’ll make me stay here for the rest of my life.’

‘Oh God, please shut up. Just stop. There’re ways to pass any test. I keep some pills in my cabinet, goldenseal. That’ll help clear you out. I’ll cut your hair down too. Sometimes they take hair samples and check those as well. When you’re done eating my food, go get my clippers from the bathroom.’

‘The job only pays six-thirty an hour. That’s not enough for this humiliation.’

‘Well, when you get paid, maybe you can put some pride on layaway.’

Bald, clipped, and razor shaved, I walked home. The half-empty pill jar recommended two a day for two weeks to ‘properly flush the system of impurities.’ Sitting in their container, the stuff looked pretty harmless. Like ground-up lawn grass, green and fibrous, compressed into small, hard, jellybean rocks. Not something that could hurt you. No white powder, multicolored beads, painted coating, or gelatinous shells. Twenty eight pills required, thirteen and a half hours to go. I chugged the first two, swallowing them and their pickled-ass taste down. Two more every two hours. Flush my way to freedom.

Midnight: force two past my tongue, put a jug of tap water out, set the alarm, try to fall asleep as their sourness replaced the saliva in my mouth.

Two o’clock: warm oblivion, but the buzzer kept coming and then I remembered. I took two more pills, a swig from the water nipple, and a piss so long and loud that I was totally awake by the time I flushed it.

Four o’clock: the ritual was repeated only out of respect to my conscious self. Too tired to get up for another piss, I reached for an empty Pepsi bottle lying among the trash that cluttered my floor. The plastic rumbled while I filled it, going from cold to hot.

Six o’clock: the sun had returned but too soon because I needed sleep, so much more sleep. Always. Putting the piss bottle back I squeezed it too hard. Whiz splashed all over my hand. Tears from eyes. Mouth saying, ‘Damn, damn’, as I reached for a shirt to wipe my fingers down.

Eight A.M. the bell went off. Eight-ten it went off again. Eight-twenty I got out of bed. In the bathroom mirror, my head was still bald and I splashed cold water to watch it dribble down. I spy. The only hair visible on me besides my eyebrows were the little strands poking out of my nose. I grabbed the biggest of those and pulled, looked down and saw coarse black disembodied strands between my fingers. They would never catch me.

Nine o’clock: staring at the nurse’s closed office door, piss stinging like Drano wondering if they could take a sample from the puddle I seemed destined to make below my chair. Trying to think bad thoughts. David pouring vodka over his nappy chest and dropping a match there as he tried to get a fag started or David lighting himself with no fag in his mouth at all, screaming Chris like it meant Ayudame as the flames engulfed him. Fi at Dio’s, sitting around the kitchen table and laughing about me and my slave-descended pedigree. Right then I reminded myself to devote more of my melancholia to Fi’s abandonment in the future. I’d been neglecting that anguish. Apparently, even for a lonely man like me, the pain of getting dumped by a lover was easily overshadowed by the guilt of mortally failing a friend.

Almost bursting, I heard the click. There was movement at the nurse’s door. But it was just another guy coming out, looking as unemployed as I was. Sitting down beside me, I could smell cologne and leather upon him. That could be part of the test: they put you in the waiting room to the point of exhaustion with a mole. Just like in Kiss of the Spider Woman . But that was stupid. That was the pee talking. I wondered at the dreads that hung like willow branches along his cheeks.

‘Did they cut your hair?’ I asked.

‘Nah,’ he said, confused, staring at the way the fluorescent lights shone off my dome. ‘Nurse Howard cut yours?’

‘Yup. She’s a rough one,’ I told him.

The office door kicked open. She was as big as gluttony could imagine, covered in a plantation of white cotton, smiling like this wasn’t a cruel world after all. Reaching out to me, fingers of overstuffed socks.

‘You got to go, don’t you? You really got to go. I know that look. You wanna go now,’ Nurse Howard told me, smiling, pointing me in to her office door. ‘I know you. You went to Northeast, right? I recognize you. You used to catch the number 26 bus.’

‘A long time ago.’

‘Uh-huh. Your skin really cleared up good. Used to catch the number 26 bus, got off on Chelten. You remember me?’ She looked familiar, but she could have been my twin and I wouldn’t have known. At 400 pounds her features had become bubbles.

The office was too small for her; there was no way she was going to fit between that desk and that wall. Where was I to piss at? At the sink left of her chair? I could do that.

‘You can do your business.’ Ecstatic, I started tugging on my zipper. ‘Not here, eager boy. You crazy, you know that? Open the door.’ A closet? That would be fine. But when I hit the lights it was a bathroom.

‘Take a cup from the dispenser, let the beginning of your stream out into the toilet and give me a sample from the rest. Try to fill half of the cup.’ Half a cup, half a gallon, I didn’t give a shit. I was already squared up in front of the bowl, reaching for myself before Nurse Howard closed the door on me. Ecstasy, the truest kind, my head bent to the right side, my eyes squinted as if witnessing the glory of the Lord, the rumble of my water hitting the porcelain pond almost loud enough to cover my groaning.