Gordon was running his scrawny ass off—a crack head without his crack, but running on week old backwash Pepsi, three day old moldy coffee, and a half bottle of prescription diet pills. As he pounded down the sidewalk past the new movie joint with his ears ringing and bleeding from that pig working him over with that Batman wand, he saw a world gone nuts—and Gordon Stamos knew nuts when he saw it.
He had been there when Lanky Rochester used a blow torch to take off that Mexican’s toe nails for bogarting the last beer in the cooler.
He had watched Dizzy Malls fly into a diuretic rage and overflow the toilet at the lawyer's office just because the big old suited Jew had laughed at their charge—smoking crack at a State Police checkpoint on the 4th of July.
He had watched David Russel smoke his retard kid’s special education tuition in three hours—and had helped.
But all of that shit was what stoners, tweakers, junkies and crackheads did. What was going on today seemed to involve everyone, making of it a hell on earth, depriving a dopefiend of the distant though leveling visions of unreachable straight paradise that bordered his world with a kind of sterile sanity.
A fat man was laying in the street singing up into the sky with one hand held out like he was trying to touch God.
Two rich old ladies were holding hands and skipping—splat—no they weren’t, they were now stuck to the grille of a trash truck; a trash truck that kept on driving as if its driver did not have a care, pulling in behind the strip to pick up its dumpster, with Granny Hop and Granny Skip both stuck, still twitching—to the face of the reeking mechanical monster.
A county cop was pistol whipping a bus driver in front of his bus, as all of the losers and junkies piled off the bus chanting at each other—no, chanting at one particular guy. Candy Cane Shane was limping away from the bus with his barber-pole striped cane, required ever since those bikers jumped up and down on his leg for selling them oregano blunts. He was worried and not acting like the rest, as he tapped his hearing aid—required, so legend had it, after he had been worked over by some psychotic grocery store manager/boxer for panhandling on the sidewalk, while a Salvation Army Santa Claus rang his donation bell—perhaps to make sure it was working, and looked over his shoulder at the five or six zombie stoners walking toward him as they stumbled past the cop beating the bus driver with his pistol in that same vacant looking way the state cop had beaten Gordon.
Gordon was no longer running. The Frankenstein cop pursuing him was out of sight, lost behind him in the crazy seething mass of Monday morning humanity. His ears were still ringing crazily, his heart pounding, his chest heaving. He was afraid maybe he would have a heart attack now—what would Mom think?
That would break her already savaged heart. And in the left hand of Candy Cane Shane, resided the answer to his every fleeting woe; woes that though they might be quick to pass, still had to be ushered onward into the nonexistent future through self medication as quickly as possible—well, just because that was the path of least resistance. And although Gordon might just be a crackhead-stoner-dopefiend-alcoholic—he remembered his military history, and following the path of least resistance had gotten it done for Rommel, until Mustache Man had made him sit on the Atlantic Wall—and it had damn sight worked well enough for Gordon Stamos!
Every dopefiend knew that Candy Cane Shane scammed like a pint of methadone from those East Side clinics every weekend and made his deliveries up here to the rich kids on Monday morning in the Towson Town Center parking garage.
“Well the hell with that,” Gordon snarled to himself, “If this is the last day on earth I sure as hell am not going out straight!”
Just as he envisioned blind-siding Shane it occurred to him that Shane—low down scoundrel that he was—was the only person here that he knew, that he should help Shane. Just as the devil inside of him rose up to protest this soft-headed idea, the angel that lived down in his pinkie toe rose up to remind him that Gordon Stamos did not know shit about methadone and that he could use some expert guidance in its use, lest he croak and make Mom cry for that big final time. After all, the only drug he did not do was heroin, as he feared the ending of his pointless life like a douche bag, trying to beg one last breath from an uncaring world.
Candy Cane Shane was now being swarmed by five junkies, all of them crawling over him with their hands reaching for the goody bag of methadone vials as Shane buckled under their weight and came to his knees in the gutter, looking over his shoulder pleadingly at Gordon.
Gordon looked into those pained eyes of Candy Cane Shane, eyes he had always despised, knowing Shane to be a soft manipulator, that got through life a lot easier than a feral crackhead who had to leap fences with pigs in pursuit, brick homeboys in back alleys when they tried to rip you off, punch out the occasional abusive employer, and, after the judge failed—inevitably, it seemed—to see it his way, even break bad with the gang bangers in the lockup when necessary. Gordon the crackhead looked on Shane with the same pitiless—could be envious if he cared—eyes as Gordon the janitor/dishwasher/pizza delivery guy looked upon Viditus, his Lithuanian boss, regarding his superior across the distant social gulf that separated them. But today—right now, this very moment—there was something human, some vulnerable caring light, in the eyes of Candy Cane Shane that managed to pluck the last dry-rotted heart string in Gordon’s emaciated chest.
Gordon and Shane were one in the same, the only two people in this crazed world without that glassed over look in their eyes, without some mindless mantra spilling from their mewing mouths. Shane was being borne down to the concrete now, his face smashing against the sidewalk, his knees in the gutter, the sacred satchel of mind numbing mood juice fumbling feebly in his left hand, as his striped cane snapped against the curb and a big denim covered knee pressed into his back.
As the rage of some mute pixie soprano fag rang in his ravaged ears, Gordon Stamos: crackhead, dopefiend, alcoholic, stoner, burglar, drunk, and thief, looked upon the last human on earth being buried in the gutter by manic zombie hands, and that human looked one last time, pleadingly, up into his forever bloodshot eyes.
