TRACY HAUGHT
CW – drug use
Puking by the Sea: An Ode to Slim and a Bic Pen
prose finalist in our 2020-2021 Writing Contest
It was getting dark. We walked along the boardwalk toward the shadier motels, the motels where we wouldn’t be noticed, where we could do what everyone else in the motel would be doing on any given night and not have to worry about someone calling the cops. I could barely make out the ocean across the street, or the blurry amusement park to my left, without my glasses. It looked like some burnt-out ghost town back in Dodge City, unloved, forgotten in the gray-violet dusk. No matter how many times I saw it, I thought of the movie The Lost Boys, which was filmed there. Then I thought about the two Coreys. My sister and I had been hardcore in love with Corey Haim, not the other one.
I took a drag of my hastily rolled cigarette, spit out a piece of tobacco. The smell of some kind of roasting meat filled the air. Pork? I hadn’t eaten meat in years, but the salty smell made me hungry. The bowl of split pea soup I’d had at the Catholic church earlier had burned off hours ago as I walked all over town doing my usual hustle.
We popped into the mini mart on the corner where I pocketed a chocolate bar while Slim bought a pack of smokes. I bummed a real cigarette off of him as soon as we left, enjoying the soft feel of the filter between my lips. Slim walked like that character from Fat Albert—the really tall one that wore the orange newsboy cap—only Slim wasn’t that slim.
I barely knew him. I barely knew anyone. I was always on guard, not that it made a difference. If someone was going to screw you, they were going to screw you regardless. What I did know about Slim, was that he was a much bigger player than I’d ever be, than I wanted to be.
His main gig was China White, but he could usually get Black Tar, if you were looking. I tried to stay away from that shit. I had enough problems with meth. Some say a junkie is a junkie, but I’d come to prefer a meth junkie to a dope junkie. Heroin users were almost always on the needle, and something inside of me knew better then to let myself go there.
I met Slim through Zach. I’d met Zach my first day in Santa Cruz. Mutual Deadhead friends. Zach was in his mid-twenties, tall, with shaggy, unwashed, brown hair. He let me crash with him in his van a few times. The second time I’d slept in his van, he told me he had to run out to see his kid. I didn’t know he had one.
We pulled up in front of a small cabin in the woods just outside of Santa Cruz. I waited in the front seat as he walked up to the front door and knocked. A tall, pale woman with bushy black hair answered the door. She had dark resentful slits for eyes. She was wearing a long patchwork skirt and a purple halter-top. A little girl with short brown braids peered out from behind her skirt. When Zach squatted down on the porch and opened his arms, the girl started crying and hid behind her mother. The woman sneered at him as he got to his feet. She began to yell things like, “Sperm-donor,” “Loser,” and, “Sorry Son of a Bitch.”
And then she noticed me.
“So, you bring your child-whore to my house? She’s even wearing your shirt, how cute.”
Zach pulled the chain from his back pocket, opened his wallet and handed her a wad of bills. He flinched as she took the money.
He wouldn’t talk the whole way back to Santa Cruz. I could tell he was trying not to cry. When we got to the beach, we smoked a joint in the back of the van, fucked for about fifteen minutes, and then he professed his love for me, telling me that after his next heroin run, he’d have enough money to run away with me.
“Somewhere far away,” I said in a stoned whisper. “Like France or Spain.”
Zach nodded, his eyes closed, his head resting on the inside of his arm.
Slim and Zach were in similar situations. They’d both gotten their girlfriends pregnant, Slim more than once, but they were rarely allowed to see their kids. Slim had enough money to set his ex-girlfriend/baby-mama up in a small place just off West Cliff Drive a block and a half from the beach. I stopped there with him and this guy Beany one day for a fix, when he knew his ex was out with the kids. I watched them shoot up in the courtyard, and then I poured that acrid shit up my nose. I puked in the bathroom after, feeling guilty splattering the toilet with vomit as I eyed the Disney toothbrushes in a cup on the sink next to me.
We walked down to the beach after we’d all had our turns puking. That was the only other time I’d hung out with Slim. We sat in a circle in the sand, lost in our own madness. The oblivion I felt sitting there, unaware of anyone else on the beach, was it. That’s why I did it—to stop caring, to stop fearing, to fly free for a few moments in elevated disconnection. I kept telling myself it would be the last time.
I’d intended to live this romantic life on the road, where I could taste every bit of my existence in its authentic-ness, fully, and then write something Kerouac would approve of before I died at a young, tragic age. I was so far into denial that I couldn’t look at myself in a mirror without seeing myself as someone else. All those things I told myself I’d never do, the list that I kept checking off—there goes that one, and that one—and oh, there’s heroin.
Maybe all of those dark parts of you aren’t really so dark, maybe they’re just other parts of you. Who’s to say? I wasn’t murdering anyone; I wasn’t the BTK serial killer back home, smiling in church on Sunday and murdering women on Monday. I was just murdering my sense of self a little more with each passing day. I kept telling myself it would make great novel material someday.
* * *
Slim had been at the park earlier that day with a few of us who were talking about going in on a room together. I’d been sleeping in the redwoods all week and was looking forward to a warm room, even if it was just floor space, and a shower. Slim asked who had a good driver’s license, meaning, who didn’t have an outstanding warrant, or who was innocent/stupid enough to still carry proof of who they were. I was the one. My boyfriend of a month, Ray, was extremely paranoid. He stayed downtown while Slim and I went to get a room.
* * *
Slim dumped the contents of his pockets onto the bed: cigarettes (name brand), a Zippo, a plastic bag with his personal stash of glass (the best meth in town), and a rolled-up twenty-dollar bill. I eyed the meth anxiously. I could tell he was trying to impress me with the rolls of cash he so carelessly displayed. Nobody did that. I turned on the bedside lamp in between the two doubles, pulled out my pack of tobacco, slipped my rolling papers out of the pack.
“Help yourself,” he said, nodding towards his cigarettes. I reached for one as he began crushing shards.
He cut me two lines, my reward for putting the room under my name. I pulled out my handy snorting tool. It was just the white shell of a Bic pen, hollow and cut in half. Slim eyed the device with an impressed smile. After the lines were gone, he gave me twenty bucks for that cut in half pen.
We were supposed to meet up with the rest of the group, but he wanted to take a shower first. I sat on the bed smoking a cigarette, jotting down my spun-out thoughts in my notebook, every pore in my body tingling with super-powered alertness, an aliveness that kept me coming back for more.
When I looked up, Slim was standing at the end of the bed, naked and dripping. He kind of looked like that red-haired caveman dude in Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. I’d never seen someone so hairy, his chest hair slick with water, looking as if he’d combed it. His penis was completely surrounded by frizzy, red pubic hair. I would’ve said it looked angry had it not been hanging so limply, water dripping off the end.
He stared at me with his palms outstretched like, Look what you’ve got here, little girl. He started to play with his penis.
I frowned. His eyes were somehow wide and narrow at the same time, a look that said: I’m not accountable for my actions. My body was rigid. My heart pounded in the sides of my head.
“Ray’s waiting for us.”
Slim looked around the room like he was seeing it for the first time.
“Fuck. You better not say nothing, cuz nothing happened.” He started back to the bathroom, stopped, turned. “We’re good, right?”
I just looked at him like, That’s yet to be determined, asshole.
When he was back in the bathroom, I shoved my notebook into my backpack, put the twenty-dollar bill and the snorting pen, along with a handful of twenties that were still sitting on his bed, into my pockets.
That was the last time I saw Slim. And I never saw Zach again, either, not after he told me he’d run away with me. He had traveling and lots of heroin to sell and do. I heard rumors that Slim got popped up in San Francisco and was doing major prison time. So many people were getting busted. Everyone around me was getting picked up, but not me. Ray said it was my innocent look. I looked like a nice girl who didn’t bathe very often.
I never did tell Ray about naked hairy Slim in the motel room.
I stopped at the beach that evening before walking back downtown, just long enough to vomit up the candy bar. I thought I was sobbing but I wasn’t. It was some kind of internal soul sobbing—invisible but visceral—my chest and arms shaking. I looked up and down the boardwalk. I was cold. I was all fucked up. I had nothing. I had nobody. I had Ray. I had me. I had nothing. I had nobody. I was cold. I lit a cigarette and started walking.
An excerpt from Tracy’s novel, The California Stories
Tracy Haught has written four novels, holds an MFA in Writing & Publishing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and is the fiction editor for Isele Magazine. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in: Awakened Voices, The Bridge, Cybersoleil, Magnapoets, Helix Magazine, Hunger Mountain, The Lumiere Review, Oklahoma Review, Poetry for the Masses, Polyphony, Prime Mincer, SLAB, and Sugar Mule.