got my move on
march 5

San Francisco

"What are you doing?" asked my roommate, about a week after his latest episode, when I gave him a choice: come with me to the hospital or go there with a police escort.

"I'm packing," I replied, even though I thought it was pretty obvious, what with me carrying an armful of flattened boxes. I had been packing the last two nights.

"Why?"

"You're addicted to crystal," I'm not remembering every word, but we got into how I wished I could help him out, and I tried and it wasn't working.

"No I'm not," he said with a straight face. My eyes were too tired to respond and thank god because they would have rolled so far up in my skull that they wouldn't have come down.

"It's crack."

Well. Shut me up. All this time I said it was Tina. I thought only street hookers and certain pop divas were still doing crack, and that gay men had moved on years ago to meth. Then again, my roommate never hungered after the trends in the gay community before, why start now?

"Ok, crack," I stood corrected, then promptly resumed my cramming, and not the kind I get compensated for. I didn't know how to feel about his revelation. I was impressed that he spoke a simple truth, and I wasn't sure if on the scale of drug addictions, where crack stood in relation to crystal. To me, they both begin with the same 'kr' sound, as does crank, the scariest sounding of the three; I don't think I could differentiate between the substances and their manifestations.

Because crack has become tamed by public vernacular, it seemed almost 'old school' when he told me. How many times had I said "crack on" to label an extra enthusiastic reaction to a situation? But there was no enthusiasm in this scene, besides mine to get my bed to my new place as soon as possible.

Let me describe my little abode. OK, that was it in a nutshell, well, a corner of a nutshell. It's the smallest place I've lived in since the Carlotta Valdez in the Castro, also known as The Vortex because of all the drug drama that went on there. But this place is quiet, across the street from a park, with plentiful parking. And as I find a place for most of everything, I'm learning another form of cramming, the compensation being my peace of mind.

So on a rainy night a neighbor whose breath smelled of alcohol (I didn't care, at least it didn't begin with 'kr') helped me get my mattress and flat files out to my new place, and there I slept without wondering what was going down in the next room.

Besides being quiet, the new place is almost pitch black at night, which is how I like my bedroom. The only shock was when I got up in the middle of the night to pee and turned on the 'hall' light. The blast of protons was so jarring it crashed my internals and I froze up quicker than an AOL account. it stunted my growth I am sure. The next day I bought the only Xmas lights I could find in February: a string of ten, operated by two not included C batteries.

But I'm making progress, the new place will be client ready in a few days. I come across new glitches every day, and remember my Short Mountain lesson in patience. Sometimes laundry really can be an all day affair. And on a related note, due to the trouble I'm having setting up my new internet connection, there may be a longer than usual delay before my next entry, and I don't have to clarify what entry I mean, do I?

what I'm reading: the latest Troubletown strip from Lloyd Dangle

what I'm listening to to: Street Player from Rufus, featuring Chaka Khan



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