The Start of Something

There were three [type] oysters on the plate in front of Joseph. On the half-shell and placed in crushed ice. There was a little bottle of Tabasco, the size of a thumb, a ramekin of horseradish, and several lemon wedges arranged on the small plate so that it looked full and bountiful. He chose to smoke and admire the fullness of the plate rather than eat them. It gave him a satisfaction, one similar to that a child might have when his sibling has finished their ice cream and he is still enjoying his. Anyway, the bloody mary was fantastic and his Lucky Strike was ruining his palate. They looked pretty, with their glistening violets and blues and white shells with bright blue crescent patterns barely visible under the edges of the shells. Surely that was worth the fifteen dollars.
What was worth more was the moment he was enjoying. It was January in New York City and he was sitting outside a cafe on the UWS under a heat lamp. It was Sunday morning, so the traffic was calm and unitrusive, a quiet scrape like waves on a windy day at the ocean. The sky was a cold blue, and the clouds were brilliant white fluffy ships serenely gliding across the frame of the avenue. The waitress kept eying his ashtray as he ashed on the pavement. He liked this.
The coat he was wearing was a wool peacoat with just a few holes that looked like they were eaten by ancient moths. It was dirty, but it was black so for some reason he felt it was good to wear. He buttoned it so that the flap wouldn't interfere with drawing a sword, but the lack of button-holes for every button when done up left-over-right in the peacoat sometimes gave him the suspicion he was wearing a womens' garment. He didn't care at the moment. No one else was outside at the cafe, just him, his oysters, and his heatlamp. As he looked down the avenue, entranced by the clouds crossing the avenue he considered that a trip on the Staten Island Ferry may be a good way to pass the morning. There was something magical about the free ferry. At least for one round-trip. After that it became a trampsome, anxiety-ridden, prison. And who, after all, is really consoled by hot-dogs?
He flicked his cigarette into the street, managing to avoid entirely the sacrifice of dirtying up his table with the beautiful oysters by using the ashtray. He liked the clean glass ashtray, and put it in his pocket without making any attempt to be covert or even discreet. The waitress, who had been watching the ashtray in case she should have to replace it with a clean one, came over and asked if everything was ok. He said that the oysters were beautiful and that she should have them. She was too concerned with making sure she was doing her job right to accept the gift and asked if he would like to send them back. He said, "No love, I want -you- to have them. I don't expect you to quit your job, sit down with me, and slurp down these oysters but I want you to take them back into the restaurant and enjoy them." Then he killed the Bloody Mary and took out another cigarette from his peacoat. She took the oysters in and came back out immediately with a new ashtray and the check in a black check-presenter. He put a twenty dollar bill in the presenter and walked to the curb to hail a cab.
As he stood on the curb and waited for the light to change to send a wave of cabs down the block, a song crept through his lips. The song was "Antichrist Television Blues". He held his hand up as a cab slowed to a stop in front of him. He sat in the car, and told the driver "Staten Island Ferry Terminal, please." As the car pulled away he saw the waitress pick up the presenter and remove the 20 dollar bill.
The trip downtown was a classic Broadway drive through Sunday traffic. The cab driver made efforts to stay in the undulation of green lights that the signals iterate in their traffic pattern. He felt like he was riding a wave through the island of Manhattan. Times Square's glowing commerce was eclipsed by the bright morning sun, leaving an illumination of the general grime that is the street in NYC. They rode through the scaffolding, people with causes, tourists, electronics shops, the occasional surviving porn vendor, and restaurants and skyscrapers.
The Staten Island Ferry Terminal is stark, on both sides. The car let him out at the base of a curving walkway around the terminal. The water was brown, red, & green, like some kind of metropolitan tea. The ferry wasn't there yet, but he could see it coming off in the distance. They left every 30 minutes at this time of day.

Joseph had spent significant time on public transport going nowhere for any particular practical purpose. In Berlin, he had ridden the Trams to unknown destinations & back. He had ridden the A train to JFK and back, just to see the people that were on their way to the planes that seared white through the cold sky. The sight of a plane on its way up always moved his heart a little bit, evoking some sentimentality about the relief he always felt when on his way to a new city or a new country. He didn't have a driver's license and didn't really want one.
The ferry bumped its way into the dock. He could hear the passengers laugh and shout at the clumsy approach. As the ferry secured itself to the dock, the rails lifted and the platforms lowered that support the auto passenger traffic. The ferry disgorged everyone except the sleepy, perhaps drunken men in dingy clothes and wool pull-down hats. As Joseph walked into the inside of the ferry, he saw a rather short New York Police Officer in a uniform that was too big for him. The policeman looked like he was wearing his father's uniform. The cop walked up and down the rows of plastic benches, banging each one with a sleepy, drunken man with his club so that the report would wake the man. It was a symbolic effort, and not much more.
There had been nights where Joseph tried to sleep on the ferry. Times when his addiction had stripped him of everything and he was too embarrassed to ring the buzzer of a friend so late to ask to sleep on their sofa. The police at night seemed to find a greater importance in dislodging the disenfranchised. Still, he would get 25-30 minutes of sleep at a stretch, maybe a solid hour here or there with the sole interruption of the cessation of the consoling hum of the engines and the sway of the ship. Usually, a policeman would order him off the ferry at one terminal or another and threaten arrest if he saw Joseph again. Joseph once sleepily wandered around the Staten Island side of the terminal, finding a cleanish mattress on top of a small building at a park on which he uncomfortably drifted in and out until the morning when the sun reminded him that he was a heroin addict and had miles to go before he could sleep.
This was the burden of being a heroin addict. The endless and constantly challenging procession of errands to run in order to stave off the sickness that creeps upon the body and psyche of the unwell junkie. Joseph wasn't the best criminal, and had typically found that the best way to maintain an opiate habit was to have a regular, well-paying job and to develop a solid reputation as a good customer with a heroin dealer. Still, credit was always an awkward request, a request that drugs be provided without payment on good faith that the debt will be settled. Eventually, though, any budget became stretched as a habit grew to fit its potential. As a result, Joseph would be condemned to giving the dealer all of his money from his salary without ever achieving the consolation, the warm and loving relief that was a 'fix'. The greatest effect was a settling of his stomach, a return of his appetite, and a small relief as the encroaching anxiety and weakness was alleviated.
Joseph didn't know any other way to live. At 13, he was sleepless and lonely at his grandparents' house. It was late, in the middle of the night. He stood in front of the corner-wrapping bookshelf where there were hundreds of National Geographic magazines and looked at all the spines for anything he hadn't read -- or at least hadn't read and would be interested in. On the other shelf were miscellaneous classic books in hard bindings. ***Robinson Carusoe shit.*** On a shelf above these was a book titled 'PDR: Physicians Desk Reference'. The idea of a reference appealed to him. He liked the library, and the library wouldn't let you borrow their references, so he imagined the book must contain information of Encyclopaedic variety and drew it from the shelf. He flipped the pages and saw categorizations of Indications, Contra-Indications, Effects, Dosages, Side-Effects, etc. The side-effects interested him. To a degree, he understood that they were effects on the body that went along with a drug or an activity.
He saw Morphine Sulfate and read that it was an opiate. It described side-effects of sleepiness, drowsiness, constipation, nausea, and euphoria. Euphoria was a new word and in spite of trying to Latin out it's roots (it's Greek) he couldn't understand it, but the dictionary was on the same shelf. He looked up the word 'euphoria'. It read:

"euphoria: a feeling of well-being or elation; especially : one that is groundless, disproportionate to its cause, or inappropriate to one's life situation -- compare DYSPHORIA"

Joseph had been a phenomenal student. He tested exceptionally well, and was granted unusual liberty and privilege at school. He had always been involved in the strongest academic groups and was awarded praise across the spectrum of studies. At school and on T.V., messages that drugs kill were strongly promoted. Posters, speakers, audiences, commercials, and articles all strongly made the point that 'Drugs Kill'. As a child, he would often pray:

"Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take."

This prayer upset his younger cousin, David. The idea of dying made David afraid. Joseph hadn't considered that it would be a bad thing, and in recent had mourned the death of his paternal grandparents, Polly and Roy within two months of each other. She died on October 24th. Polly had spent a lot of time, in fact raised Joseph for periods. She was beautiful, superstitious, magical, loving, and had an old sense of humor. She was in a lot of pain as she died, from a host of cancers over some time. Joseph was only ever able to help her in one way. She asked him how he managed to fall asleep so easily at night, in contrast to his sister and cousin, and her own self struggling with anxiety and pain. He told her to think of the color green. "Just Green?" she asked. "Green, like the ocean, and trees, and fields," was his answer. She told him the next morning that it helped. His young mourning of his grandmother was classical and romantic.
Roy shot himself to death 2 months later on Christmas eve. When Joseph's mother answered the phone that night Joseph knew what had happened before she said "Hello." Christmas morning brought a numbness, an addled trance set to the music of the video game Roy had bought him.
Even before this, he had had a conversation with his stepfather about the fact that the sun was expected to eventually burn out, thus rendering death on Earth. That conversation had a profound effect on Joseph. He laid in bed at night considering that the fact that he was anything at all was a mystery, and that this mystery was a precarious thing with a predetermined futility. He prayed that god would take it back, that he be nothing at all. Nothing made more sense than that as nothing, no grief or failure, no frustration or disappointment could be felt. There is no loss from nothing. These ideas didn't depress him, and he was very calm and sure that this was a good solution to the greatly painful experiences he knew, experiences which were now framed in a universe which was fleeting and ethereal.
This prayer was not answered, and he was being treated with a revolting tenderness by adults.
In any event, he realized that there were medicines that were not his in his maternal grandparents' cabinet, and that this reference would describe what they were for and what they did. 'Euphoria' was exactly what he wanted. He would have promoted it from side-effect had he been a doctor.
Joseph went to the medicine cabinet with the PDR. He looked first at the bottles with label stickers that had dizzy heads or martini glasses.