4

We squealed around dangerous curves, toking as we passed a Mexican ice-cream cart, kids selling flowers on the corners, dusty red hills, dungarees and sombreros hanging over balconies, and gaudy low riders hopping like grasshoppers in the sting of the feverish temperature. I take off my shirt and let my dirty black bra serve as a bikini top. Black bras aren’t just for wearing with the skullheads, while tossing around in the sheets- it is a real fashion statement to push the immodesty factor to exhausting limits. Skin attracts males. Plain and simple. And right now I am hitching a life from the club and I want to stay in the system. Nothing ever remains the same with games, and working a battered but clean motorcycle gang requires skill. I thought I learned it from Shreeve years ago, but that didn’t end up as pretty. I still wake up crying like a baby from that- and it was years ago. “Turn that head of yours off” says Charlie. I laugh and tell her “it’s numb” but it isn’t, and my heart is beating faster with curiousity as we pull up to the club.

3

I am leaving the hospital this morning and I feel like a poor recorder already because of all the questions by nurses, doctors, and therapists. I long for morphine. I think about jumping from a window to break a leg for fun. I don’t. I lay and wait for Charlie to come rescue me from this place. It would be more comfortable to snuggle back into blissful ignorance and pretend the lacerations on my throat weren’t itching me. I know I will get more nagging questions from the Skulleaters at the club. Even worse, the stimuli of the laughter about how it was, and the quiet I really crave will be gone as I try reducing myself to the joke of it all, and try to belong once again. Being a Skulleater must be the blood and flesh of your life. A Skulleater is an old lady to the Skullheads and I want that so bad I feel bleak and grey as I climb the ranks, paying my dues. I am not a Skulleater yet, and I am desperately planting the seeds to become one. My own nightmare fragments of life need a support system and without them I am nameless, and with them I can gain an identity within. Until them I am like a cat scratching at a chair aimlessly in dark while the whole world slumbers. I’ve lived my life in the dark corners of my own prison, and being a part of this club is more important than my planned suicide I’ve fantasized over for years.
I think I crave someone who will never be my enemy. With Charlie I can be honest. She could be a saint, and I wouldn’t care, even though I loathe saints and never understand them, and always wanted to be one all at the same time. I would not give a hells fire about it. I would never deny her as a friend. I collect friends and lose them as easily as one does her virginity.
Charlie storms in the room anxiously. “Ready love?” I am ready. I am not ready. I love it here, I hate it here. “God you look so fucking blue, and why the fuck can’t we smoke in here?” She has personality. I wish I were her. “Get me the hell out of this laboratory.” I pull my clothes out of the clear plastic bag full of my life-gear, strip down and start getting dressed just as a plump nurse rushes in to unleash me from my IV before I yank it out myself. I stand up to her naked, wanting her to look at my naked body as if I were posing on accident. I’m bruised up and I love my bruises. They show me I’m alive. Charlie stares Florence Nightingale down like she is the enemy. She rarely likes anyone, and is suspicious of everyone.
You have to be suspicious of everyone when you have secrets. I have many, but the one I will never tell anyone, even her, is what plans I have for the club once I become a real Skulleater. I dumb myself down sometimes, pretending not to really know what’s going on. I may not know sometimes, but the club has no idea what’s in store for them once I’m in. I have resentment and someone is going to pay for it. I smile as I roll out of the hospital by wheelchair and climb in the front seat of Charlie’s old Plymouth. I turn up the radio and light a rolled cigar edged with cocaine, driving off into the new horizon.

2

You can’t start over with each new second but that seems to be how I live my life. Nothing is real except the present, but the weight of the centuries smother me even though they were so long ago. Someone, somewhere, hundreds of years ago once lived as I do, and she is gone. Did she make a mark, did she matter, and did she feel as I do? Some day I will go to, but as I lay here in hospital gowns I know I don’t want to die.
This continuous quicksand is winning and I don’t know how to swim. “What drugs did you take?” says the doctor as he judges me, raising his overgrown eyebrows high. “I don’t know, maybe cocaine, maybe some pills.” He looks at the nurse I know that he wants to fuck. She has a real job. She has a real life. She probably had a family. She is Snow White, Cinderella, and Rapunzel, and she is acting like the all American virgin ready to pounce. I hate her. Why is she staring at me taking notes like I’m on trial? I had sticky pads holding cords all over my body. My heartbeat was echoing slowly on the monitor but my mind was racing as it always does. I hope the club doesn’t hear about this. They don’t like negative attention and this is a huge fuck up. If they saw me like this, I wouldn’t be allowed to hang around, and earn my respect. Another overdose. I had this part of my life down, and did it well.
Within minutes the team of white intellects are restraining me and shoving a clear plastic hose down my throat. I gag and fight but they win as they shove it, cutting the sides of my throat like a sword. Black charcoal shoots inside and I know I need more oxygen. My nose has a deviated septum and I can’t breath through it. I close my eyes and pray, feeling like a prisoner of their will. I throw up my black-charcoaled insides, topped with colorful pills like a candy factory. It’s over. I can rest. I can get out of here. I want to stay under the radar and don’t want Dr. Jessica Shaw to notice I’m here. She has a way about her that I don’t like, but my respect for her isn’t hostile. I know when to stay out of the way, and when to sparkle. Now is the time to disappear and stay out of the way. I fucked up.
I stare at the neon white ceiling and think about the club. They don’t like things like this, and this event will certainly not help me get closer to them. Why did I have to take that last pill? If only I would have just drank some of the toilet water I spilled my drugs in, maybe that would have been enough to hold me over. I don’t want to be a junkie; I just want to change, someday. I slip my hands between my thighs and masturbate away the feelings alone in my room. I imagine the club gang banging me. Tonight I am ugly; I have lost my ability to attract males. And in the life of a Skulleater, that is a rather pathetic. I orgasm all over the sterile sheets and finally feel alone. Alone. Alone. Alone.

The beginning

The beginning
The rain echoed, making my heart beat faster, as water dripped through the hole in the ceiling of the damp clubhouse bathroom. I rolled up another dirty dollar bill and snorted up cocaine from the back of the toilet, “Don’t take it personally” said my girlfriend Charlie as she polished her frosted lips in the mirror. I wanted her lips, but only I knew why. I wanted her to hold me. I wanted the music to stop blaring. I wanted to be alone with her but the demons of my past were hidden in secrets tucked behind the mountains. Violent secrets I ran away from but never forgot. I wanted her, knowing she was as toxic as the chemicals I was inhaling through my nose. I wanted her, and I wasn’t gay. I wasn’t even bi-sexual. I wanted her to be my friend, my lover, my sister, and my mother. She introduced me to the club. She showed me my new family, that I could belong to something. I didn't belong though, not yet, not completely. I'm no one's old lady, but at least I'm in, well almost. I am living my life to be a Skulleater, someone’s old lady in the club. A real part of the Skullheads, the darkest outlaw motorcycle club of them all.

I wanted everything but had less than nothing.

I thought about Shreeve, the pimp that I tried to forget years before. I took a swig of the tequila I had stored in my dancer bag, and swallowed a dirty pill I found on the urine stained floor. Bikers aren't known for being sterile. It's the leather that turns me on. The club. The family. I wondered what kind of pill it was as I waited for something, anything to kick in. My jaw was broken and my front tooth was missing, but I kept it all together with makeup. I had a new tooth on order, and it would fit me perfectly. I had already lived eight lifetimes in one, and my last was swirling downward as quickly as the toilet water I flushed. I wanted to drink the last of the toilet water because I had dropped drugs in it moments earlier. I think Big Bob must have had someone clean the toilet, it didn't look bad. He was not a Skullhead yet, but he will be one day.

I stood up and balanced on stiletto pumps as I took another look in the mirror, hardly recognizing the face that stared back at me. I was blurry, I was scared, I had lines on my face and my lips were as bright red as the lamps from the red-light district on El Paso’s border. I was high, and had been for years. I was trying to escape a part of me I could never hide from. The club is nice to me. They let me forget and they don't ask. I don't tell.

I was running but I couldn’t even walk.

Blood crusted my cocaine snotted nose, and I pounded on my legs and body, scratching it raw to feel, but numbness won, and I liked that too. No one could feel me, and I couldn’t feel myself. Charlie kept doing lines of cocaine, fixing her lipstick as I just stared. She had been an old lady before, but now she just hangs around. She has respect somehow. Maybe her past has secrets that keep her bonded better than the glue you smoke. Her skin was tan from the long rides on metal steel.

Thunder struck outside, pounding the walls like a strange devil as I fell back to the ground “It’s personal Charlie, it’s personal, we need to pray, please lets pray to Heavenly Father” I said, right before snorting one more line from the toilet. "Get it together,” she said. "Don't let them see you like this." I let my heart deaden, and just then, as I deflated on the floor, everything went black. I was home.