Faith Junkie, Part Three
A DJ’s set spirals into chaos after a girl collapses on the dance floor. What follows is loyalty, memory, reckoning, and a goodbye you’ll never forget.
This is Part Three of a draft for a three-part story, inspired by a relationship I had with an adjunct professor in my early twenties. You can read Part One here and Part Two here.
The memory of what also happened next stays with me to this day, the same way a moment in time is held still in a vision, something that can never be recovered—a crystallization that makes the image of Veronica dancing in front of me, as though she were trying to enter my spirit. Not by telling me how awesome I am (which is easy for anyone to say and not mean), but by the way the music I was playing made her body move. Like my spirit, through the music, was possessing her.
The way she danced—moving her body as though she were a voodoo priestess caught up in a frenzy, turning around periodically to laugh in the faces of the Train Spotters who continued hovering near the booth while calling her a bitch, which seemed to make her go into more of a frenzy—was both hypnotic and humorous.
What prevented her from fully possessing me with that vision of her was my having to keep my eye out for Mariam on the dance floor. It didn’t matter if she blew me off; she was someone I loved immensely, and, knowing how fragile she was, I couldn’t dismiss her with the same ease she had dismissed me. From my vantage point, I could see her following Salvatore, along with the other suckerfish, as he cruised the crowded dance floor, bumping into various young men and either handing them drinks that had been passed to him or palming off baggies filled with pills in a handshake.
At one point, Veronica stopped dancing, came around the booth, grabbed me by the face, and said, “You can either work while watching me and the floor or while watching the floor and Grandma out there; you can’t do all four.”
Because Mariam had chosen to follow Salvatore, I needed to follow Veronica, especially the way her body moved.
The night went on, and my DJ set went on, and the crowd on the floor went on and on, and the way everyone seemed to dance in unison, regardless of whether they were gay or straight or trans or drag, everyone was one through the music, and for a moment, I appreciated what Salvatore was trying to accomplish: for everyone to dance with all their might, like David before the Ark of the Covenant as described in 2 Samuel 6.
But within that oneness, I couldn’t help but spot Mariam in the dance, as though everything about her had been subsumed into that collective, where she was no longer a woman but a drone, connected through the closing of her eyes to the hive, until it appeared something in her caused her to open her eyes as though startled. Terrified for her life, she cut through the crowd to rush up to me in the DJ booth, pushing Veronica away to say, “I don’t feel good! He put something in my drink! I feel like I’m dying!”
Mariam dropped to the floor and began to convulse. Veronica, who looked as though she was about to go in on Mariam, dropped to the floor to tend to her. I looked over to where Salvatore was—now shirtless—dancing with his eyes closed as though he were David, while the flock of young men who had followed him like suckerfish rubbed their hands all over his chest and the rest of his body.
When he opened his eyes and looked over at me, then at Veronica trying to pull Mariam up from the floor, he smiled.
And I lost it.
I wanted to hurt him. I wanted to hurt the crowd who, in their hive mind, appeared high on acid and ecstasy. And I did just that when I shifted from tracks built on hypnotic synths and repetitive beats to distorted guitar chords laced over hardcore breakbeats. The sound hit the stoned crowd too hard and too fast, layered with shrill, eerie samples that screamed in a disembodied voice, Choose to be in league with the devil.
What was meant to be a communion with something higher now became a reckoning with something lower within the spirit of the hive, who had been dancing in unison but was now frantic and wild—as if the disembodied voice I sampled to play on continuous loop—over and over, Choose to be in league with the devil—forced everyone’s hidden fears, every unresolved thought, the thing they all needed to confront. To reckon with the need for drugs, the need to escape the devil in all of them, their eyes widening in horror and rolling back, faces no longer smiling but grimacing in psychological pain, forcing all to drop to the floor and writhe from their now bad trip.
Salvatore, who didn’t appear affected, for reasons I could only imagine—that a psychopath has nothing in them to confront because they’re usually echoes of the people around them—came up, stepping over Mariam, who was still convulsing, and yelled at me, “You’re ruining it!”
Veronica stood and pushed Salvatore. “What did you give her!”
I raced around the booth. I rammed my fist in Salvatore’s face. His old ass dropped to the floor. The goons that had been hired to be security raced over and swarmed me, grabbing me by the back of the neck and steering me to the door. They did the same with Veronica and Mariam, tossing us all outside and shutting the door on us.
I wanted to take Mariam to the hospital, but she howled, “No. I wanna go home. I wanna go home.”
I flung Mariam over my shoulder and carried her to my car, placing her in the backseat with Veronica, who continued to tend to her.
Mariam kept mumbling, “My car. I can’t leave it behind.”
I left behind my box of vinyl, which, unlike her car, I had no hope of ever recovering, and started my drive back to the Bronx.
Veronica wanted to stay, and together, once back in Mariam’s apartment, we tended to her as she continually vomited while recounting visions of all the horror she’d witnessed as a journalist covering the AIDS epidemic. She looked at Veronica at one point and said, “You remind me of the most beautiful and most wonderful person I’d known, but she was taken away—taken away by God—because her husband was on the down-low and gave this faithful saint of a woman HIV, and she went down fast. I hate God. I hate Him. There is no God.”
Then she turned to me and said, “Are you mad at me? For falling off the wagon? For blowing you off? I didn’t mean to.” She started to cry. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m only human. You don’t know how much I wanna feel hope for the world again—people are so ugly, so ugly—”
I held Mariam until the crying tired her out and she fell asleep. I carried her to her bed. I turned to Veronica, who was beside me, and said, “Thank you for helping her.”
She said, “I still don’t like her. But that doesn’t matter. When it comes to this, how could I not? I’ve been where she’s at, and trust me, I don’t wish that on my worst enemy… Just before we met, I went out with some of my girlfriends to a bar around the way, and we met some guys who bought us drinks, and the next thing I know, I’m waking up naked on somebody’s couch. My clothes were on the floor, along with empty condom wrappers… No one was around. I got my clothes and got out of there and went to the hospital, where they called the cops… Like I said, I don’t wish that on my worst enemy—the grilling 5-0 gave me, like I’d done something wrong. So, it’s all good, just like you and I are.”
Veronica smiled. “You could’ve just kept playing out. You could’ve just said, Fuck her, for blowing you off the way she did. But you didn’t.” She sighed. “It’s why I fell in love with you, too... Damn, love’s got nothing to do with anything if all you do is play records and not make money. Why can’t you just drop out of school and get a real job?”
“Because I need a degree to get a ‘real’ job. What’s it to you? You have your man now. He’s got money.”
“He won’t knock a motherfucker out, though. You know how many times dudes out here have gotten fresh with me in front of him, saying nasty shit, and the only thing he does is say, ‘Let’s cross the street’? Why can’t I have a guy that’s like the best parts of the two of you?”
“Do we still keep doing our thing?”
She paused. “Yeah, we keep doing our thing, but after what happened tonight, I don’t know if we keep doing things, no strings attached. I need more from you… Maybe my beef is with my man, and he’s the one that needs to step up and be ready to punch a motherfucker out… I’m confused… Please take me home.”
We left Mariam’s apartment. On the drive back to Castle Hill, Veronica kept going on and on about how I should give her what she wants and drop out—that feeling safe was now just as important as good sex and having money, and that I could provide all three if I stopped being so selfish and got a real job. I just let her talk. She was in her feelings, and somehow my experience that night reinforced what already had been an idea: don’t try to offer answers or solutions, just let them talk.
I drove back to Mariam’s and climbed into bed with her. Half asleep, she snuggled up to me and whispered, “I’m sorry,” one last time before I passed out.
I woke up with her not next to me, nor in the apartment. I went into the kitchen, where I found a note on the counter. Just below it was a plastic bin filled with empty wine bottles. It read:
I don’t know how I can face you again. What I do know is I’m not ready for a relationship of any kind. That’s why I’ve gone to the hospital to see if I can check myself in, either for psych or for whatever program they have for someone like me, with my mental health challenges. This is too much for someone your age. Go find someone who doesn’t have the baggage that I do and be happy. You can keep the key. Just please leave. I will always love you.
I will always love her too. It’s why I decided to look back on that time in my life now that I have a son and daughters who are the age I was when I was young and impressionable—and also, in the case of my son, a gigantic douche and meathead.
And no, the kids are not with Veronica. I kept up my friends-with-benefits arrangement with her until her boyfriend proposed and she accepted, because the one thing she wanted most in the world was to not be like Mariam, but to start a family and be a mom. Even though I understood her motivations, I could never be with any woman who’d judge me first by what I can provide, so I said, Godspeed with you, and moved on.
That night made me realize I needed to move on from a lifestyle that—if I had allowed it to continue feeding my ego, from just how much I was able to make crowds move to my tempo through the songs I played—I’d be at the age I am now, looking pathetic while trying to play to a crowd younger than my daughters and around the age of my meathead son.
I did see Mariam once more, years later, in a bookstore. Her hair was silver like the moon. Her beauty, transformed through age into an elegance, cast her in an aura of grace. She was sitting at a table, promoting a book she had written about what she had seen during her time as a beat reporter in San Francisco.
After her event, we first talked about her book, which she said she wrote as a response to how cavalier young people are now approaching HIV, treating it more like a sexually transmitted disease that has a treatment rather than the death sentence it once was. She said she wrote the book in anger over the disrespect she feels the younger generations are now exhibiting toward the disease and, by proxy, toward those who lost their lives: beautiful, wonderful human beings who were cut down in the prime of their lives while being treated like lepers and outcasts in the process.
She cried. “I’m so happy of the progress that’s been made but… somehow, it feels like gay erasure, but more insidious.”
I took her out to dinner, where she continued to share where her life had gone since the day she left me the note. She went back to teaching, then retired, and, in her words, she was just waiting to die because she was tired.
I couldn’t help but say, “That would be a disrespect to that woman, who fought hard to move on, and who took a young and impressionable meathead under her wing. That gigantic douche still loves her and always will.”
It is all these things I’m remembering of her, as I read her obituary. The brave woman who bore witness to the people who cannot, nor should they ever be, forgotten.
Want more? My Instagram isn’t where I write, but it’s where I share the images, music, and moments that shape the stories I tell. If you’re into the culture, the vibe, and the history behind these worlds, follow me @viktor.e.mares.
Also, my novel The Desert Road of Night, which explores many of the themes in my short stories, poems, and personal essays like this one, is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, and most major retailers.