When I feel the stuff in me, I am alone in a room crouching and watching and I am in my head and I can see me on the outside, the real me, but I can't touch me, but I am not sad or anxious. I just watch and I am relieved that I just can sit and watch. Redmond scored some needles from his mom who worked at the Strasbourg Hospital changing linens for the patients. Sometimes she took him to the hospital with him and he ran around there, while his mom worked. One day he found a medical supply room and pocketed a handful of syringes. Redmond was my heroin mentor. He shot me up my first time at recess, behind the school building in the alley. I was scared and cold and i watched my breath leave my mouth in disappearing clouds and the needle went into my arm and I flinched and Redmond told me to stay still and it felt thick as it popped through the skin on my arm and then a rush of cold in elliptical waves, like a clean snowstorm inside my body and I looked up at Redmond and passed him into the strip of blue sky between the buildings above. I don't know when, but I started to feel sick and dizzy, like I was turned upside down and I felt like I was going to vomit and I did. I vomited up brown fluid with red chunks, then green and yellow kernels, then blue viscousy liquid, then white froth, then thin clear diaphonous fibers, like cotton candy, and I couldn't feel better for what seemed like forever, but Redmond stayed with me and he placed his hand on the back of my neck and I remember his hand. I loved his hand there. Strasbourg was strange and phatasmagorical when the Germans came. I remember feeling both scared and awed by the changes. Their was a dark mood, and yet everywhere, at any time, something unexpected would happen and this had a morose appeal. Especially as a kid where I couldn't completely understand the consequences, i just soaked in the snippets, like looking through a Viewmaster or the feeling of walking through a State Fair, where everything is commotion and wonderous and furious and random energy. German soldiers in symmetrical packs marching briskly. Piles of books burning on sidewalks. Soldiers beating women in front of their husbands in the middle of the street for wearing berets. Glass breaking and men crying and shouting. Snippets. Strange, sublime images. Surreal and real. Intense.
Next page