Once upon a time there was a band named Dumpster.

A Brian Huttenhower project. Famous A&R guy who signed Soundgarden and then succumbed to crack.

The lead singer was a dude named Robert English. He simmered. Brilliant blues eyes, big front teeth, one chipped in half and a bald head. Burly and coiled like he’d just been released from prison.  My sense was he would combust with violence like taking a breath.

I was afraid of him.

His girlfriend was all tall amber pale and vampy. She was a B level porn star and he was a heroin junkie. I feared him when he needed his demon but I liked him. Very smart and very funny. Tons of dark charisma. Nosferatu and Anton LeVey.

An anarchist.

A nihilist.

He showed up one morning to the recording session with an eyebrow missing. When I asked about it, he smirked, looked away and said he’d woken up with it  resting perfectly on his pillow. He said he decided to leave it there, just as he found it.  He described it with his hands.

He was lying.

There was maybe a radiation leak.

Dumpster was an angry band. Furious punk rock with excellent pop. Kelly, the drummer told me that Robert’s girlfriend had the ugliest pussy he’d ever seen. I didn’t understand until he popped in a VHS one day. It was an incredibly ugly pussy. The color was wrong. Like those badly lit menus overhead in cheap ethnic restaurants. Garish and glistening color with fucked up contrast.

We took a break everyday around six when she showed up with Robert’s rig in a small tin.  He didn’t want it around otherwise because he was serious about what we were doing.  He was limiting himself.  She nurtured with slender hands and a soft voice until he was high and then patronized with long fingers and dirty nails once he was.  She was was afraid of him but in love with what she wanted him to be.

She smelled of dryer sheets and feminine deodorant.

He told me a story about getting hit in the face with a full can of beer while walking along side a highway in South Carolina on a hot summer day. He said he figured he deserved it because he was just some fucking punk and that was how his front tooth was chipped.

He said it didn’t hurt much. He was lying to me about all of it.

I hated that.

He was a lion, just sitting and staring at me, tail flicking, sizing me up.

Until we did smack together, and he became a very dangerous cartoon.

We began to talk about it. I did my best.  It took a few days. He ended up being a pretty forthright guy. Heroin was pretty much the only drug I’d never experimented with. I was more than curious.  I’d seen people die from it. I was an idiot.

He was not about to be responsible . No way would would we be shooting it.

So we waited until we were finished recording one night and smoked it off aluminium foil, inhaling it with a glass tube.  Chasing the dragon. Bubbling brown sugar streaming down burning chrome as we followed it with a Bic flame from underneath.

He coached me the entire time.

Making sure I got a good hit and wasn’t wasting his dope.

It was pungent but sweet.

Curry and honey.

The high was ridiculous and overwhelming. Almost hot. Molasses in my head. I could not believe how comfortable I was.  An earthquake would have been a curiosity. We had beers and talked about what we were working on. We had another hit. He walked me through it again. We talked about his life. I didn’t understand how such an angry man could succumb to such flowery observations in such a syrupy calm and swampy Carolina drawl.

I wondered if he would be homicidal without it.

Some people need to be medicated.

The next night we finished and waited for the band to leave. We took a plate from the kitchen and I snorted grainy beige sugar into each nostril. His lines were longer and fatter than mine. I was glad of that. We took  a walk. I told the guard we’d be back on the way out the front gates.

Up La Brea and onto Sunset. We walked a while without saying much. The lights and neon were gorgeous and the exhaust and fast food fumes coated me so spectacularly pleasant. Enveloped in the city and it’s most lethal drug.

Glazed and nestled in the soft wholesome fibers of Hollywood autumn twilight. I asked about his anger and whether heroin might be what balanced him. He took his time and finally said he imagined there were better things out there but he didn’t know what they were.

He was telling me the truth as best he could.

He asked me if I was having fun and I told him I was floating in bliss. I said to him I can never do this again and he smiled for the first and last time I ever saw and said under his breath he hoped not.

I never did.

It still haunts me.

Don’t doubt that the randomness of life is in someway synchronized with all the things that we don’t understand about the universe. It’s what we do know that confounds us. All the while, what we don’t know blows us along.

Drinks for my friends.

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