Cycling 22.4.24

The heat was suffocating. As I paced Ellis Square, I found myself thinking back to a time when I’d gone there with my mother— a woman who was described by those who loved her as ‘complicated.’ We’d taken our bikes and cycled around and around. She’d gotten me an ice cream— the kind that was so cheap and had so much sugar in it that it made your teeth hurt— to distract me while she went and met someone she called a friend. And I’d pedaled. Around and around. Just waiting until she came back with a lazy smile on her face, staring into the hot sun, to take me home.

In the years since then, I’d found that if I walked around Ellis Square for long enough, and looked forlorn enough, it was only a matter of time before some opportunistic fool came up and started bargaining with me. The fastest I’d ever gotten an offer was three minutes— it was something in my eyes, a Kafkaesque quality which spoke to my endless search to fill that dark, larger-than-average-beetle-sized hole in my heart.

Opportunists. They could sniff me out, like dogs- a potential client.

I turned around to make another lap, back and forth, back and forth across Ellis. It was coming. Like rain on the horizon, I could feel the advancing approach. But who would it be? So many potentialities scattered here. Would it be Baldie, sitting in an anarchy tee that showed off skinny, track marked arms? A big bull terrier at his side, ready to rip my balls off and eat them before shitting them out for some child to step in? Or was it Fingernails Lady, whose name I felt was very self-explanatory? Who would be my saving grace?

Ellis Square could not rightly be called a park, although it likely was for tax purposes. It had all the quintessential elements of a park— trees. Bushes. Benches. A large cement semicircle for unknown purposes, and a large semicircle of dead grass for young girls to do cartwheels on (or, if I had enough illicit substances rushing through my veins like a polluted Mississippi River, occasionally a 25-year-old man to do cartwheels on).

But the term “park” implied a degree of community or neighborliness, something that simply could not be found in Ellis Square. Was it in a neighborhood? Allegedly. But I felt as though it existed in its own space as its own neighborhood. Sure, in the mornings you got white women with little dogs walking through in tan, floppy sun hats, smelling of sunscreen and summer sweat, swimming through a wet, Savannah heat. So thick the air felt like a pool, and there was nowhere for perspiration to go other than your back, in your ass, and down your legs, like warm piss in a young boy’s jeans (or the sweatpants of a 25-year-old man under the influence of a myriad of uppers, downers, boomerangs and hallucinogens).

On a day like this, what I really wanted was an ice cream.

But, when the sky turned from Fentanyl blue to a warm and cozy Methoxetamine yellow, the sunhats went away, and Ellis Square became prime junkie real estate. Cool evening breeze carried sweet scents of unwashed clothes, sour sick, and a wonderful cacophony of sounds: music playing through phone speakers, rasping voices jabbering and raving, saying things like,

“Yo man—wanna buy some Airpods?”

“What?”

“Airpods.”

The guy in front of me was wearing too many jackets and jeans that hadn’t yet realized they were being held up by a belt. Calvin Klein briefs. He brandished the two pearly white cases under my nose, and I jerked back.

“Holy Jesus!” His fingers smelled startlingly like old cheese. “No thank you, I’m good. But hey, you got any stuff on you?”

Cheese Fingers considered me, a frown on his face as he wiped said cheese fingers on his pants.

“Got Airpods,” he said with a shrug. He was being coy— it was part of the game. Likely offended, too, by how quickly I’d clocked him as a soap dodger (though, as an avid soap dodger myself, I had no real place to judge).

“Anything else?” I asked.

He looked me up and down, his eyes like black pools, and I thought, by God. If I ever meet Death, he’ll have eyes like Cheese Fingers. Gave me the heebie-jeebies.

“Nah. Nothing.”

“Psh, shit, man. Alright. How much for some airpods then?”

“Fiddy.”

“Fifty? Get the fuck outta here.”

“Be a hundred new.”

“Alright, shit. Fine.” I fished in my pockets, careful to pull out two twenties and a ten and absolutely nothing more. Let no man see you prosper. “Here.”

He took my money and held it up close, looking at it so intently that I thought he was going to stick it between his teeth like a golden Spanish doubloon. “Aight,” and he gave me my new Airpods. I sniffed them experimentally— vaguely cheesy, not overpowering. Acceptable.

“Whatchu looking for anyway?” He asked.

“Not picky. Y’know, what I really want is ice cream. They still sell ice cream here? Shit, I could go for an ice cream.” He turned his face up to the sun, staring at it idly.

“Whatever, man.” Cheese Fingers shook his head. “I don’t fuck with health food shit. I could get you some smack— how ’bout that?”

Ah, opium. The religion of the masses. That thick, sickly sweet brown syrup. I’d been told once by an alleged psychic at a Renaissance Festival that I should avoid downers- a recommendation which I found both oddly specific and vaguely offensive. To prove a point, I’d paced around behind the commedia dell'arte stage- the Renaissance Festival equivalent of Ellis Square- until one of the carnies, a man who juggled torches on a unicycle, had asked me what I was looking for. I’d ended up buying what was probably enough heroin to subdue a baby rhinoceros, and also his unicycle.

In retrospect, she was almost definitely right. I did better with just about anything else. But the lovely thing about a mind fixated on its next hit was that hindsight became an abstract phenomenon which applied exclusively to other people.

“Sure, smack’d be keen,” I told him.

“Aight. Imma call Gak, he’s a G— he’ll fix you up real good, no shit. Wait here, don’t go nowhere.”

“How about an ice cream, think you could get me a cone?”

He chose to ignore this. Maybe he thought I was kidding— I was deadly serious. But he was already hopping across Ellis Square, pulling out his phone to call up my Saving Grace.

I went back to pacing. Back and forth, back and forth. The dead grass crunched beneath myfeet, creating a small deer trail as I circled the square again and again and again. I leaned forward, hands kissing the earth and kicking my feet over my head, wondering as I cartwheeled if that was sweat in my jeans, or piss. I would stay. Right here. Going around and around as I waited for the Death Angel Cheese Fingers to bring me that special something that might at last fill the larger-than-average-beetle-sized hole in my heart. Around and around and around.

When all I really wanted was an ice cream.