If the angels knew us better, maybe we wouldn’t have to scream

Vancouver is strange… you can brush your cells off on thousands of other people daily but never touch another soul.

Sitting in the corner of a dirty coffee shop on Hastings, Arrie pulls stories from inside her with the speed and accuracy of machine gun fire. Her eyes rarely focus, darting instead to the tired waitress manning the cash, or the washed-up pimp playing solitaire in the corner. Her fingers endlessly worry the frayed seam of her tattered shirt, but I’m not expert enough to know if she’s high or nervous or both. She’s throwing stories at me one after the other, and it’s all I can do to keep up.

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He follows. She rides. They are energy rushing down the hallways of invisible waves, owning the moment until it fades. Adrenaline. Fire. War. She jumps up onto concrete and keeps running, looking back occasionally to watch the railroad police become smaller and smaller and blend into the graffiti art. He laughs crazy disaster laughter. His bones shake when he laughs and then he coughs and spits up blood on the concrete next to her. She hopes it infects the whole city with his virus so that he doesn't have to die alone.

"The fumes from the spray paint is probably not too great for you, Fred," she tells him.

"Living ain’t too good for me at this point, Arrie. So I might as well have fun and do what I love." And then he looks up at her and smiles a big smile, exposing the blood dribbling down from the empty sockets of his crack cocaine destroyed teeth into his crazy beard full of sweat and dirt. The top of his head is bald and the hair that remains hangs around in small scraggly clumps. He's got dirt, blood and spray paint staining his shirt. He looks like a cross between Einstein and an old bum who somehow had LSD crystals blown into his wandering eyes, leaving him permanently spun out. Beautiful and revolting are united into a bunch of violent cells that make up Fred.
Soon he’ll be just another stranger of an angel that plays jokes on her from the gutters of heaven. Until then, she’ll make sure he has enough spraypaint to mark his stories on the walls, immortalizing pieces of him for years to come.

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She’s one of those girls in the back of the newspapers. She’ll show up at your door for 60 bucks and then come inside for more. Her smile is infectious and beautiful.

She smokes all your Newports and makes your skin sweat. But you call her and she comes to your door again and again. Sometimes you wander down the street to the bar where everybody knows your name but not your heart. On dark nights she drifts off to sleep next to you and you believe the illusion you’ve created. You joke about how you resemble the characters in "Leaving Las Vegas". That’s her nickname for you, MikeLeavingLasVegas, and you believe in you and you believe in her and you believe in the ad in the back of the newspaper.

When she leaves you to destruct alone, it isn’t hate baby. It’s all love. She knows you so well. You’re in her brain and her veins and her soul. But you don’t know her. She’s just whoever you wanted her to be.

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The old lady shuffles into the clinic with the other broken souls, the sores covering her face marking her as a victim of the virus that keeps killing her extended family. She stops beside a young, tattooed girl, " Arrie, you bitch, why you never call me,” she asks out of breath, angry, but still smiling.

Arrie looks up through bloodshot, invisible eyes, "I did call you Aida. Last Sunday. You were sleeping and I even called you the Sunday before that but you never answered."

The old lady laughs. Choking on her laughter. "I'm such a bad mother!" she says giggling. Arrie laughs.

In the course of Aida's dementia she’s confused the young girl with her daughter. Arrie always plays along, the only one who refuses to call her crazy. Because in Aida’s world, Arrie is her daughter. They embrace and the people around shake their heads.

The counselors at the clinic say Arrie is only encouraging her insanity, but the truth is, she’s only ever seen Aida smile when she loses herself in their special mother-daughter reality.

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On Hastings now, trolling among the junkies and the hard-core street walkers, Arrie stands out. Still young enough to be beautiful, despite the fact that in another five years the opiate will have wrinkled her skin and dulled her eyes.

She saw an old friend yesterday. "Dee what happened to your teeth?"

Dee’s smile spoke slowly of self-destruction. “It makes sucking dick easier" Dee laughed.

Arrie laughed.

They laughed together.

Arrie says you can’t understand unless you’ve seen Dee working the corner, waiting to turn a trick.

Turn a trick.

“I can’t stop using that term”, I tell her “… it gives the illusion of magic.“

Arrie shrugs, “It’s like Maya Angelou said bitch, 'Still I rise'”

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This morning she hitched a ride from an ancient Russian man. He had whiskey breath and was swerving all over the road. He told Arrie she was "too pretty for tattoos" and then held out his arm, exposing faded bluish ink tattooed on his hand.

"What is that?" She wondered.

"Just numbers,” he answered. “I was in the concentration camps when I was a kid. They did it with hot metal." He told her stories that made both of them well up with tears.

At the end of the ride he held his hand out towards her and spoke softly. "Can I touch your hand?" he asked. "I haven't touched a pretty girl’s hand since I was in my twenties."

She held out her hand towards his and his eyes lit up. They accomplished human connection.

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She wasn't supposed to wait
Until her disease escalates
It’s spreading like wildfire
And we all know
Fire can either kill or transform

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All she wants to do is dream. That’s what the opiate needle is for. She just feels things so intensely and everyone around her seems like a zombie wrapped up in a material world of bullshit. She just doesn’t want to feel. He called her an empath. He said it can be a lonely world when there’s so very few of us. She wishes for her dead road dog to sing her to sleep. She can wish all night but reality will always set in. Still nothing grows and beautiful demons come whisper obscenities in her ear… to go reach for that telephone number of her gangster with all of his gun shot wounds, crumpled in a garbage can somewhere and ask him to sell her some of her ex-lover/poison. Her veins are thirsty but her mind is strong. And all the angels that have died before her know just what the answer is… sleep. Sometimes the weakest heart can have the strongest will.

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She sat across from a dark woman with snakes in her eyes, vicious and smiling.

"I don't want to fuck," Arrie told her.

"Well, you don't have to, our agency offers other things, private dances, sensual massage, but all the other girls fuck, its where the money’s at," she replied slyly.

"Well I don't want to."
"Okay" she giggled and her potbelly rumbled "But I guarantee you after working one week you're going to be on your back like the rest of the girls. Don't nobody think you’re special."

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“You want to know what it’s like?” Arrie asks me. “It creeps up real slow like dope-sick vomit rising in your mouth and you look around and nothing makes sense and nothing ever really did.”

She can't write because she can't express this thought the way she wants. She tried to express it the other night and instead ended up in the emergency room choking on charcoal and her own vomit. Opened her red eyes and thought, is this hell? Sure looks like it.

And there was an AIDS patient scratching her skin off through the other curtain, scratching until she saw blood, and for that one moment when she looked up it was like they were sisters in a past life and were connected through this intense energy that died as soon as it was born and then she just kept scratching, digging her fingernails deep into her decaying flesh.

“If I could have spoken I’d have told her she was beautiful,” Arrie says. “And if I had a shotgun, I’d have shared it with her.“

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Her mother was Chaos, ging 95 miles per hour as if silently whispering to the sky, telling her we were ready to die. ‘”C'mon Baby, Fuck with us.”

“Hitching rides with serial killers and when we heard him talk about the smell of rotting flesh my homeboy reached for his gun and I held him back because I could see the scars in his soul, and they reminded me of mine.”

Arrie crumples the cup and jerks to her feet with a flip of the bird. “Whatcha gonna write anyfuck? 'Dear Life, You are such a bitch… and I want to lick your pussy.”

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They stayed up until four am in the alleyways, searching for dumpstered food and other thrown away treasures including roses, pizza, astrology magazines, a scooter and a perfectly good bicycle. It's crazy all the things people throw away.

She’s been sweating all night. Kicking methadone is worse than street dope. She’s on a low dosage but still it hurts and her dreams are insane. They scare her and she lives with that same insanity all day.

“It hurts”, she says turning to stare out the rain-splattered window.

Only certain seconds of life are beautiful.

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