Mr. Potato Head cops hard drugs while on tour with the Vegetables
The morning Mr. Potato Head decided to cop dope on tour he woke up earlier than he usually did. So far for most of the tour he had been waking up before everyone else, but today, knowing beforehand that he’d be trekking out into the ghetto of this city to find the dope spot to buy himself some heroin, his anxious thoughts didn’t let him sleep in until his accustomed time.
He got up, packed up his sleeping bag, took out most of his possessions from out of his butt. He knew one should enter the ghetto in search of drugs with the least amount of things in case someone was to stick you up. Out came his glasses, his mustache, his shirts, dice, dominoes, shot glasses, and a diaphragm. Mr. Potato Head had a lot of space inside himself. He kept the cash he’d use, two twenty dollar bills, a little extra earned from the music they’d been playing on the road. The people had been enjoying them. They were called a fun band to experience.
He walked out the door, leaving the rest of the members of the two bands sleeping. He walked back toward those homes he remembered seeing on the drive to the place where they had crashed. Those houses seemed the equivalent of ghetto cars whose bodies were of one color and their doors of another because they were made of pieces of different cars with different paint jobs. Some portions of these homes were tin, others wood, others cement. No house was painted of one color. There was no pattern to the choices of color shades.
Arriving to a block of these houses, Mr. Potato Head looked for someone. The neighborhood was deserted. There were a few people hanging out on lots by some of the houses he saw far away. But they didn’t look like drug addicts. They looked like citizens. Finding heroin in the ghetto of this city wouldn’t be an easy task.
It was a sunny day, though cold. He walked up a sidewalk in between two parallel rows of homes. Their shapes were identical but the materials used for their compositions varied.
He walked on through them and found nobody. He made a left onto a similar-looking street. He was searching for someone who looked like they spent too much time on the streets.
He walked around this hood for about twenty minutes not seeing anyone else. What kind of hood was this? It sure wasn’t like the hoods of the city in the Caribbean country where Mama Potato Head lived. There, by six AM, the drug addicts were alive on the streets, jittery and anxious, making sure they got their fixes.
Here, in the capital city of the United States, he was having trouble finding the dope spot. He was having trouble finding a dope fiend.
He saw someone. He saw a skinny, non-white person and he thought he must be a drug addict. Mr. Potato Head started after him, though the man he thought was a drug addict had already disappeared from sight. But at least he knew in which direction he had gone. He had seen him turn right, looking as if he had disappeared into the buildings’ walls.
Mr. Potato Head went to where he had seen the man disappear. It was a humid alleyway. He saw wetness on the floor. Sunlight was unable to reach and dry it. In the distance of the alleyway he thought he saw a light, but before that light, all he saw was a lightless tunnel. He saw more homes tightly packed together on both sides of the path. He saw the man he was following becoming smaller in the distance.
When Mr. Potato Head took a step into the shade of this alleyway, he was walking into a portal that led him into another reality inside of our general reality. Inside what seemed like the limited space of an alleyway was an infinitely sprawling parallel world. From one end of the block to another existed a universe: a universe of tin shacks, cheap plywood outhouses, homes dropped on top of homes, people living inside cracks of the walls.
The man he had followed had disappeared. If Mr. Potato Head wanted to get high on heroin while on tour he’d have to enter this world. He stepped forward. Immediately the air smelled different, like wet dirt. The color of the atmosphere had changed. Everything was darker and seemed as if under a black light. The lampposts’ bulbs now shined violet. Though when Mr. Potato Head had entered the alleyway in search of heroin, it was day out, here in the alleyway, it seemed as if it were night.
He walked forward, passing more houses, some cement frames of what were once cement houses, exposing their insides: the emptiness of lives once present, maybe a couch with a pillow on it, gray with mold. A table held paraphernalia on it: needles, spoons, small plastic bottles filled with ammonia and water, opened containers of baking powder.
Mr. Potato Head walked forward. All the houses were two stories or more. From some of the second or third floor windows, older, heavy ladies hung out their upper bodies. On the narrow street ahead of Mr. Potato Head, a skinny, burnt man yelled to one of the heavy ladies. She lowered a rope which had a basket tied to it. The man dropped something into it and she pulled up the basket. She then dropped the rope again and the man took something out of the basket and left.
Since the person he was initially following had disappeared, and this alleyway became much more than a straight, short distance, Mr. Potato Head followed this man he saw exchange something with the lady. This man also looked like a drug addict.
The drug addict walked into an alleyway that was inside this alleyway. Mr. Potato Head approached its entrance. When he stood by it he saw a hotchpotch stairway leading downwards. The walls were of sticky cement. The steps looked slippery. It seemed as if daily some tide somewhere would rise and submerge this entire area, and then would recede and leave everything wet, but since no sunlight entered the alleyway, and the purple light from the bulbs of the light posts did not give off enough heat, nothing down here ever dried.
The steps were small and half of the bottom of Mr. Potato Head’s sole hung off them with each footstep he took. The drug addict had already disappeared from sight, but Mr. Potato Head could see only one path: forward.
As he went further down he saw more alleyways which intersected horizontally with the path he was taking. He took a slight detour to the left for some reconnaissance. From his butt he pulled out toy flares, the ones sold at party stores which if you twist their top halves, the mini-flares will faintly light up and glow red because its tiny bulb is enclosed in a half-circle of red plastic, and he dropped these mini-flares so that he could find his way back to his original path. He found that there were other stairs which led downwards, but he was unsure if these paths were parallel to his original path or if they led to the same final destination. Mr. Potato Head realized that by following the drug addicts he had caught himself inside of a maze inside of an alleyway of a ghetto where all he wanted to do was buy some heroin to shoot up and be happy and not feel alone anymore. Was this too much to ask? Mr. Potato Head wondered.
Fuck this world, he thought. Goddamnit, Goddamnit, Goddamnit.
Mr. Potato Head had read enough fantasy stories to know that he should not keep on straying from his original path. He turned around and followed his mini-flare trail, the only lights shining other than a few purple lights here or there of inhabited homes or of the few lampposts. Here in this alleyway, people had lives and connections and a world of their own. Here there was no sun or moon.
When he was walking back to the path he had first went down, he saw a group of young men huddled around the open entrance of one of the homes on the ground level. There were buckets full of water which looked violet in color because of the reflected light from the lampposts. Mr. Potato Head got closer to them as he continued walking. He wondered why he hadn’t noticed them earlier when he had passed by here. They must have come out after he had passed. He was about to pass by the group of young men, but when he stood in front of the home where they hung out, his mini-flare path had ended.
He looked at the men, and they smiled. One of them motioned for him to come closer. He did. As he got closer he saw that what they had in the buckets of purple-looking water were fish. He saw that the men were either holding fishing materials, like lines or bait, or the materials were placed on the floor close to their feet. There were four men. Two were standing, two on chairs. The door behind them was open. Inside, Mr. Potato Head saw that it was only one room. He saw a fat, shirtless older man, probably reaching his 50s, with knobs where a man with legs would have knees, sitting on a wheelchair across from a bed. Mr. Potato Head could not tell what the old man was doing.
Mr. Potato Head went up to them. From stories he had been told by the Venezuelan kid, Santos, who had first introduced him to IV heroin use while in rehab, Mr. Potato Head knew that when in the hood looking to cop hard drugs, if a group of young men acknowledge you and don’t threaten to kill you if you don’t leave immediately, then, they probably know what you want. Mr. Potato Head would ask the group of young men if they knew what was up.
He stood in front of them. They remained silent. They nodded their heads slightly up and down. They gestured tiny grimaces. Their body language seemed hostile but open to dialogue.
Mr. Potato Head said, “Yo, you know what’s up?”
One of the sitting young men said, “I don’t know. Maybe. What you want?”
Mr. Potato Head had thought getting closer to them would help him discern what ethnicity these young men, and the people of this hood, were of, but it seemed that due to the purple light of the lampposts and the fact that here there was no moon or sun, the color of their skin was in reality purple. He could see their true violet skin color when they were under light waves, but under shade their skin darkened to seem brownish or burgundy. People with freckled complexions, when under light, their freckles glowed phosphorescently, like radiation seen under night vision goggles.
“I want to buy some heroin.”
They all looked at him without response. Mr. Potato Head knew that they might not know it under that code. He said all the aliases of the substance that he knew: “I’m looking for caps, droga, tecata, H, horse, boy.”
“Oh, shit. You want some ‘knock-out’,” said the one who had been speaking. He had three fish in a bucket close to him. The fish had purple scales. Their mouths were open and seemed to sing out with violet-hued air bubbles.
And so the young purple-skinned man told Mr. Potato Head which way to go to find the dope spot. He went that way, dropping mini-flares to make sure he could return to where the young purple men were, because, one, they had asked him to cop a nickel-bag of cocaine for them, and two, they were going to help him get out of this alleyway where there was no moon or sun. For some unexplainable reason, the rest of Mr. Potato Head’s mini-flare trail had disappeared.
Once he found his way to the dope spot, Mr. Potato Head had no problem figuring out where to cop his heroin. He saw a skinny man hunched over himself on a doorstep, just like the young purple man had told Mr. Potato Head. This man was older and also of purple skin. There wasn’t much light in this pocket of the ghetto, just a small purple light much above the old purple man. Mr. Potato Head had to look directly upwards to find where the light came from. All he saw was a purple glow but no bulb. Surrounding the glow seemed a void. The old man looked asleep.
Mr. Potato Head said, “Yo.”
The man’s head was down in between his knees. Mr. Potato Head could not see his face, just his glowing-white hair. His hair gave off more light than the bulb above.
Mr. Potato Head said, “Yo,” again, a bit louder this time, and bent over forward to nudge the old man on the shoulder.
The old purple man responded with a sound like that of the first gasp of air taken by a person who had just flat lined and hadn’t breathed for five minutes and somehow miraculously he or she was revived by fate and his or her eyes reopened. He shifted his head up, but he didn’t look at Mr. Potato Head. He didn’t look at anything at all because he had no pupils. His eyes were an opaque white like a person whose vision had so deteriorated he or she was left blind. In this alleyway with no moon or sun and only purple light, his pure white eyes glowed.
He unfolded himself from the fetus-like position he had held himself in. He held a cone-shaped hat and put it on. He had a long glowing-white beard. He was dressed in a dark robe. He was a frail-looking skinny, and he trembled when he wasn’t moving himself.
“What you want?” he said.
“Three of heroin, or ‘knock-out’ as you say here. Five-worth of coke.”
“Show me the cash.”
Mr. Potato Head gave him forty dollars, two twenties. The man twisted the upper-half of his body to his right. He stuck his left arm up to his elbow through a flap the door behind him had and brought out a small, shining-bronze treasure chest. He opened it and it was compartmentalized. Each section contained different colored packages. Some of the packages were see-through. The purple old man gave Mr. Potato Head three radiating-green aluminum bags and a see-through bag, the bottom half of it glowing-white with cocaine. The man stuck his face back into his arms which were rested on his knees. His hat fell to the ground and disappeared.
Mr. Potato Head had thought he was going to be paying thirty-five dollars so he was expecting change. But the old purple man looked like he was sleeping again instead of giving him his money.
“Hey, I thought the blow-up was ten each, and I asked for five-worth of coke.”
The man didn’t respond. It seemed as if around the old purple man, time had stopped more profoundly than in the rest of this alleyway where there was no sun or moon. Five minutes passed and still Mr. Potato Head had not received his money.
“Hey, old purple man,” he said. “Give me back my money.”
“Get the fuck out of here,” Mr. Potato Head heard. But he had not seen the old man breathe. He seemed dead and petrified still.
“I said get the fuck out of here.” Mr. Potato Head heard it more loudly now.
He realized this stoop where the old purple man sat was at the end of the path he had been walking on, and now he only had left or right to continue forward through or return backwards.
When he looked either left or right he saw a group of young purple men approaching him, their fronts glowing, and where shadows hit them, darkness.
He heard the phrase again: “Get the fuck out of here.” But this time they said more: “You got what you want. You used us. You kept us down for this. You use us as your excuse to destroy yourself. Get the fuck out of here!”
Mr. Potato Head turned around and began to follow his mini-flare trail. He returned to the home where the young purple men had been hanging out, preparing to fish.
Now he didn’t see the men hanging outside the home where the man in the wheelchair lived. But the door was still open.
Mr. Potato Head approached the open door. Inside on the left there was a lamp giving out purple illumination. The bed to the right took up most of the space. There was an open box of insulin syringes on a table next to a small television which was on a metal shelf across from the bed. Purple snow played on the television. The man on the wheelchair sat in front of the television, his face lit purple. His teeth and eyes glowed like radiation.
The black light of this alleyway with no moon or sun was nauseating Mr. Potato Head. He had his heroin. He was just trying to be cool and bring those purple guys their coke. He wanted to get out of the alleyway already. How long had he been here in this alleyway with no sun or moon? The bands were waiting. They were on tour and needed to be on their way somewhere.
Fuck this, Mr. Potato Head thought.
He decided to go for one of the needles in the open box. And then he’d leave.
He entered the room and the door closed behind him. He heard it lock. He heard laughs outside the door. He saw, through a small square window, the purple faces of the young men, laughing, as if they were drunk and still in college. The purple man sitting on the wheelchair, who Mr. Potato Head thought was zombied-out and disconnected, turned his face to Mr. Potato Head. His lips were thick and looked like uncooked sausages. His eyes were large, coconut-like, and he had pin-drop pupils. He mumbled stuff. Mr. Potato Head could see his knobbed legs where he should have had knees.
The man on the wheelchair said, “Oh, they’ve left me a present, my children.”
He slobbered saliva out of his mouth, and it was very noticeable when it dripped off onto the floor because in the purple light it was extra bright.
Out the window, Mr. Potato Head saw the young purple men using their fingers and hands to simulate the body forms taken by a man penetrating another man’s asshole, but instead of a penis, this man used his knees.
Mr. Potato Head realized what was expected to happen. He foresaw himself bent over, his white skinny arms touching the floor, or maybe himself chest-first on the old man’s bed, covering the back of his head with his arms as if ashamed, and his legs spread apart, crunched-down a little, and his back compartment, the opening from and into which all of his belongings entered, would be open, and into it this purple monster would fuck him with is knob-legs.
There was not much space in the room. He jumped onto the bed. He saw the table. He jumped to it. The purple monster on the wheelchair staggered violently forward. He made groaning sounds, as if asphyxiated after copulation, a forced fuck, pleasureless exercise.
Mr. Potato Head grabbed a syringe from the open box. He grabbed another. He stuck one of them into his butt. He opened the other, took off its glowing-orange cap, and stabbed the monster’s left eye. Mr. Potato Head jumped off the table, and went past the bed to stand in front of the door. The purple monster made fizzling noises and exploded. A key in the shape of a male human skeleton, the part of it which would enter door locks was in the form of an erect penis, dropped in front of Mr. Potato Head’s feet. He took it and inserted the key into the door’s lock and opened it. Then he stuck the key into his butt.
Outside, the young purple men were gone and for some reason the rest of Mr. Potato Head’s mini-flare trail out of this alleyway was visible again. He followed it and exited the alleyway where there was no sun or moon.
Outside the alleyway, time had not passed. When he got back to the place where he and the bands had crashed the night before, the members of the Dicers and the Vegetables were just waking up.
Mr. Potato Head locked himself into the bathroom and shot up some of the heroin. He was happy. He then shot up some more of the heroin, this time with some of the purple men’s cocaine, a speed-ball, and Mr. Potato Head felt Zen-like, like no one could fuck with him, like the curve of a sphere.
The bands went off to the next city to play their next show. The tour was a success.
They would return to the small university town, where surprisingly they would start to be liked. They would work on a new album and it would be released by a record label. They would plan another tour to promote it. But the Vegetables would dissolve due to tensions between members. Mr. Potato Head would get a job in a big city in the northeast of the country, so it was also inevitable that Mr. Potato Head would move away from the small university town.
Gustavo Rivera used to publish under the name "Andy Riverbed."
