THE FUTURENESS Ch5: Brown Bottles Without Labels

I’m fifteen years old.

It’s our car now, I tell my dad. I pat the hood of the Honda I’d stolen from an accident site an hour earlier that night. My family doesn’t own a car. I’m bringing something to the table, like a cat leaves a headless mouse by the back door. I am only fifteen years old. I’d watched the fatality unbuckle herself from the car and wander into the tree line to die.

It still thinks the same, though, my dad says of the car. It doesn’t know who you are. Knock it out. We’ll see what we can do with it then. He means, kill the car’s mind so maybe we can slave it over the border.

Twenty-some years later, a morning errand to see him.

My father had torn all the labels from his medication bottles so I wouldn’t know which to flush and which to steal. I took a fat brown bottle and shook it, unscrewed the lid. Scored, blue pills about the size of a painkiller. We stood in his trailer’s kitchen, pounded by the orange light of a sun that wouldn’t fully rise.

“This is once a week,” I said. “Me. Instead of a uniformed device. Way better. I fought for this, so please make it easier.”

“Fine,” he said. “That’s Viagra. It’s for the dysfunction of my penile erection.”

“Great,” I said. I lifted another brown bottle. “What’s in this one?”

“That’s Klonopin. For the fear of nothing.”

“Is it from Doctor Jeffrey?”

“Many on this side are.”

My father made a vague sweep of his arm across one zone of the white kitchen table.

I picked up a small bottle and shook it. It made a plunking, crinkling sound of pebbles wrapped in plastic.

“That’s skrip,” he said.

“Ha. You have a prescription for skrip.”

“Occasionally I do skrip without a prescription.”

“Like having a cigar? Like hitting a fast-food drive in? Occasionally? Like that?”

“It’s incredible. It’s unbelievably good.”

“What? How are you doing skrip occasionally? This is insane. It’s the most addicting drug in history.”

“Ha! How do you believe that?”

“The fucking news, Dad, fuck! Stop!”

“Why?”

“You’ll ruin your life, that’s why!”

“Who in this room needs money, again?”

“I do!”

“Please, stop yelling.”

“Oh, my god.”

“You’re upset because you don’t know anything about it. I know you’re stealing some of my other pills. Sure: I let you. But I won’t let you have any of these, due to your negative attitude now.”

“I don’t want them.”

“Oh, come on, now, Richard. Know yourself. Come up with a sense of yourself and then express it.”

“What the fuck has happened to you?”

“Stop yelling. I’ll explain. It makes you feel good, like cocaine does, and then it makes you want to fuck, again like cocaine, generic I guess, but it makes you honest—at least some people get honest, but always there are the fucking assholes—but then you see something else. Then, Richard, that’s when skrip’s different. You see yourself taken out of the flow of the story. You see it’s not real. Your spot in it isn’t real. There’s a very slot machine feeling, but slower. You landed there, but now it’s going to spin again and put you over there. They have one word for that in medicine and many in religion. And everyone around you is breathing in this, this tremendous breath of relief as they pull their slot machine levers, and it occurs to you that taking off your clothes would work—”

“Fucking again.”

“But the assholes. And there are a lot of them. They’re why I stopped going to the parties. And the infected swingers. Ha! Some things don’t change, even with the drugs.”

“I’m pouring these in the toilet.”

“To inconvenience me?”

“Oh, fuck this.”

“Underemployment, loneliness, being with the wrong woman. Your hopeless quest to get your father to stop self-medicating. That’s where your panic attacks come from, son, not the outer-space reaches of your neurons and your cute radio transmitters.”

“Such a wise crackhead.”

“It’s just slot machine wisdom.”

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