JOHNNY LOVED JENNY, even though they’d only been dating for a few months, and he thought she loved him back. He’d only ever loved one other girl in his life and it had ended badly, so when he met Jenny he decided he would do anything for her. Whatever she asked, there’d always be this little twinkle in her eyes, and he would do it. She was high on life, and Johnny couldn’t resist.
‘Let’s go bungie jumping!’
‘Okay.’
‘Let’s go to Vegas!’
‘Okay.’
‘Let’s try heroin!’
Obviously, saying yes all the time had begun to become a problem.
Johnny didn’t take to heroin. They smoked it, since neither of them could stand the thought of using a needle, and he puked his guts out. After that he was sweaty and shaky for half the day, like a bad fever. No good effects whatsoever. He was already addicted to oxy from a previous injury, so he thought maybe that was the reason it didn’t work for him.
Jenny though, she had this look in her eyes like she got when she was riding him cowgirl and close to cumming. Eyes rolled back in her head, eyelashes fluttering. All curled up on the bed like a baby, knees up to her chest, she stuck her thumb in her mouth and just laid that way for hours while Johnny puked and shivered on the bathroom floor.
When he came around, she was making breakfast. ‘Let’s do it again,’ she said, but that twinkle in her eye was gone, and she ate the eggs she’d scrambled straight out of the pan off the wooden spoon.
Johnny didn’t want to, but he said okay because that was the pattern. Wash, rinse, repeat.
The next day when Johnny came home from work, Jenny had already dipped into the heroin, and she was curled up on the bed again with her thumb in her mouth like the day before. Burning eggs smoldered in a pan on the stove and their lower flat had filled with smoke. If he hadn’t got home when he did, Jenny probably would have died from smoke inhalation, which in retrospect would have spared her and Johnny a lot of pain, but he’d been let off work earlier than normal, and he ran around madly opening up all the windows before using the door like a fan, swinging it open and closed to try and clear the smoke faster.
When he could breathe a bit better, he went back to check on Jenny, and she seemed to be breathing fine. Shallow, but she looked okay. The needle she’d used, the lighter and the spoon, blackened on the underside and little purple-brown bubbles encrusted in the bowl, all of this was spread out on the bedside table. The little baggie still had a fair amount of brown powder in it, but Johnny had no real urge to taste it or smoke it and especially not to use the needle like Jenny had because he was still coasting on his last few oxys—and anyway, who the hell would want to do a drug that made you so unaware you’d let your scrambled eggs burn down to a pile of black ash while you zoned out on the bed with your thumb stuck in your mouth like a baby? It seemed reckless, and Johnny decided he would tell her so as soon as she was sober.
They argued for hours before Johnny gave in. Jenny made it seem like he was the problem for not wanting to join her, even though she hadn’t waited for him to come home before shooting up, and by the end of the night Johnny was so tired of arguing he could almost see her point.
The next day, he came home to the same sight: Jenny curled up on the bed, thumb jammed in her mouth. The next day, the same. Wash, rinse, repeat. At least the house isn’t on fire, he kept thinking when he walked in the door every night. She didn’t even eat anymore, just the occasional dry piece of toast and saltines.
One day about a month into this routine, Johnny came home to find a skinny little white guy sitting on his bed alongside Jenny. The way they were looking at him, it was pretty obvious they’d just been talking about him as he came through the door. Johnny was suspicious, naturally, coming home to find another man on their bed, and since the two of them hadn’t fooled around since she started shooting up, he assumed the two must be fucking, even though both of them were clothed and sitting a few feet apart.
‘This is Juicy,’ Jenny told him.
‘Pleasure to make your acquaintance,’ Juicy said, sticking out a hand that may or may not have just been finger-blasting Johnny’s girlfriend. He wasn’t about to shake hands with some stranger sitting on his bed, either way. By then he’d had about enough of Jenny’s shit, and this new development was just icing on the urinal cake.
Snubbed, Juicy shifted on the mattress, working out the kinks in his shoulders and rolling his head around like he’d just left the chiropractor’s. ‘Oh, it’s gonna’ be like that, is it?’ he said, and Johnny said, ‘Tell me why the fuck you’re sitting on my bed beside my girlfriend, and then maybe I’ll shake your hand.’
Jenny said his name like he’d just stepped in shit, and that’s when Johnny knew for certain he was the only one getting fucked here. He had a bad feeling he was about to take it without lube.
‘Let me lay it out for you,’ Juicy said. ‘Your girl here owes me money. A lot of it. And I’m not the type to let a debt go unpaid for too long.’
‘How much?’ Johnny asked him, even though he didn’t want to know the answer. He felt like the time they’d gone bungie jumping, the earth dropping out from under his feet and his heart in his throat.
‘Six large.’
‘How much is that?’ Johnny asked Jenny.
Jenny told him it was six thousand dollars, giving him this look like I dare you to start with me, and if Juicy hadn’t been there he might have. Instead he said, ‘We don’t have that kind of money.’
‘That’s where you’re in luck,’ Juicy said. ‘I was just elucidating to your girl Jenny, if she sees fit to help me in my current predicament, I might, could consider letting that debt slide. Shit, I might even be obliged to send a little good luck her way, you know’m sayin’?’
Johnny had no idea what Juicy was saying, so the man laid it all out for him, the way he’d apparently laid it all out for Jenny, who kept nodding her head at all the parts she remembered in her post-heroin zombie state.
Juicy and his supplier needed to get a large shipment of heroin into Canada. Since border security had been tightened because of terrorism—this was around the time they caught the Toronto 18, back in 2006—Juicy needed a mule to carry the drugs on a flight. The last couple of truck shipments got busted, he said, and they’d lost about fifty grand total. Juicy didn’t want to lose any more money. That was where Jenny and Johnny came in.
‘With mules,’ Juicy said, ‘you got your swallowers, and you got your stuffers. Obviously, swallowers swallow these wee little baggies or pellets filled with H or Molly or Tina, and stuffers, well they cram them thangs into whatever hole they can.’
‘So you want to use my girlfriend as human luggage,’ Johnny said.
Jenny shook her head. ‘You know me,’ she said. ‘I can’t even swallow a vitamin without choking.’
‘Shoot, bitch just straight up admitted she don’t deep throat!’ Juicy said, giggling like a kid in sex ed.
‘I’m not fucking muling heroin,’ Johnny said. ‘I’ve got a job. I’ve got a reputation to protect.’
‘So do I,’ Juicy said, sucking his teeth. ‘Cram ’em, swallow ’em, I don’t give a fuck,’ Juicy said, with his cold-as-ice look. ‘You gotta man up and handle yo bidness. Your girl here, she look like kaka—no offense.’
Jenny shrugged it off, but if it’d come from Johnny she likely would’ve slapped him.
‘She look like a addict,’ Juicy said. ‘But you, even though it look like you got a little coffee in yo’ cream, you look like a typical bidnessman. Look at that skinny-ass tie. What is that, Hugo Boss or some shit? I put dis bitch on a flight, lookin’ like she do, they be searchin’ cavities she don’t even know she has before she even get to security. Dude like you could walk onto a plane wearing a bomb shoutin’ about how you wearing a bomb, and nobody would fuckin’ blink.’
Johnny sat down at the table, all the fight kicked out of him. ‘This is crazy,’ he said. ‘How the fuck am I the one who ends up getting fucked here? This is fucking insane. Can’t you see how insane this is?’ he asks them, but of course they looked at him like he was the crazy one, and he’s outnumbered.
So like usual, Johnny gives in.
Juicy starts rubbing his hands together excitedly, making a dry sound like a brush on a chalkboard. ‘That’s real good,’ he said. ‘But if you mess with me, nigga, I’ll find out where yo mama live and kill the fuck outta her.’
‘That won’t be a problem,’ Johnny said.
A couple days later, they met at a motel room, this motel room, Room 6 at The Lonely. It was Juicy’s choice of where to meet, and Johnny pondered fate and choices and how sometimes things just seemed to shift into place like a planetary alignment or a slot machine jackpot—not that he felt especially lucky. That was how he found himself in the cramped little bathroom back there, swallowing tiny pale peach egg-shaped baggies filled with black tar heroin, his tongue tasting like latex and baby powder.
‘I can’t swallow many more of these,’ Johnny groaned, literally gagging on the last one. His insides grumbled as if to back up his complaint, but he knew it was already too late to renege. At that point his only choices were to swallow the rest of them or shove them up his ass, and since his yearly proctology exams felt like a reenactment of the Battle of the Bulge, he supposed he’d just have to keep swallowing, pretty much like he’d kept swallowing Jenny’s shit ever since she’d started shooting this shit in her veins.
Sitting on the sink, Jenny urged him on with a halfhearted, ‘You can do it, baby,’ and rubbed his back like he was a toddler going potty his first time. She looked at the small clutch of baggies beside her on the counter. ‘It’s just like twelve more bags,’ she said. ‘Maybe ten.’
Just those ‘like twelve or ten bags’ could feed her habit for a month or more, Johnny knew. Add that to the eighty or so he’d already swallowed—which felt more like a million—and she could live the high life for a year; two years or more if they went behind Juicy’s back and sold it on the street themselves. The street value was more than fifty grand, according to Juicy, but since they had no connections here or in Canada, the chances of being able to unload it without getting busted or killed was slim to none.
Johnny put another small rubbery finger condom in his mouth, tied at the end, and swallowed it with a big gulp of water. The bag lodged in his throat, and he had to take another hard gulp to ease it down. His stomach was so stretched he could feel it settle among the others. His guts were like a piñata, if that piñata happened to be on the verge of butt-birthing a Chihuahua.
Jenny refilled the glass, and handed him another bag.
The cramps began violently in his lower intestines, though they moved like a bolt of lightning all the way up to his esophagus as he tried to swallow. Already sitting on the toilet (with the lid down), he knew it would be easy to drop his pants and purge himself of this painful demon, but Jenny would be disappointed, and Juicy would probably do the both of them. He’d held in a shit before. Who hadn’t? He just had to grin through the pain. Trouble was, he’d have to hold it in for several hours. From the motel to the airport, throughout the flight to Canada, and again through customs. Six, seven hours, depending on the line and delays. He thought he’d be lucky to hold it in an hour at the most.
‘Just two, three more, baby,’ Jenny told him, holding another baggie out. He’d heard somewhere you could overdose on water. Considering the bags of heroin in his guts, each one of them a potential time bomb, he supposed it should be the least of his worries.
‘Come on, you can do this…’
Johnny shook his head, the last handful of baggies rising on his gorge. It was puke or shit or both now. The antacids hadn’t helped, and the antidiarrheal—this package was about to be delivered whether he wanted to or not.
He bolted up from the toilet lid, hunched over in pain, and raised the seat, jerking down his jeans just in time to slap his bare ass cheeks on the seat.
Before Jenny could finish saying ‘Goddammit, Johnny, don’t you fucking do it!’ the baggies oozed out of him in a torrent of vile, smelly black shit, popping out of him like a wet string of anal beads, like .50 caliber ammunition complete with explosions—
‘AW, COME ON, Angel…’ Shyla said, visibly disgusted.
‘Too much?’
‘It’s a little over the top, don’t you think?’
‘You’ve never had diarrhea before?’
‘I don’t poop,’ Shyla asserted, with a look of such sincerity Angel might have believed the Lord worked through her digestive system via Immaculate Defecation.
‘If you can’t hear about poop, the rest of the story isn’t going to make a lot of sense. Just think of it like chocolate ice cream.’
Sneering, Shyla said, ‘Don’t ruin ice cream for me, too.’
‘You want me to stop?’
‘Well, I kind of want to find out what happens…’
‘Okay. Then back to the poo.’
She sighed heavily, her freckled bosom rising and falling. ‘Fine, just… no more talking about the smell, okay? It makes me imagine it, and I don’t want to imagine it any more than I already am.’
‘I’ll abstain. If you promise no more interruptions.’
‘Cross my heart and hope to die,’ Shyla said, making the gesture.
‘DON’T FLUSH THAT, or I’ll fucking kill you myself!’ Jenny yelled through the door as she slammed it behind her, proving what Johnny had known for several weeks: she loved the heroin more than she’d ever loved him, if she had at all.
The pressure on his bowels had lessened, but now his ass felt like he’d been fucked by a splintered dildo. Sweat glistened on his brow as he reached for the toilet paper and daubed his volcanic anus. He knew it wasn’t possible he could have pooped all the baggies out in one go, but it had come out so violently he wouldn’t doubt it if an x-ray revealed it to be true.
No matter how many baggies were in that toilet, all of them needed to come out. He wondered if the bags would float and remain in the toilet if he flushed, or if it would just overflow and create an even messier problem, but he knew he was just grasping at straws and time was running short. The flight was in two hours. He pulled up his pants, the cramps still rumbling through his insides, and searched the cupboard below the sink. A solitary toilet scrubber, flecked with dried brown matter, and a container of Comet powder met his disapproving gaze. No gloves.
He called out to Jenny to come help, but she refused. Didn’t surprise him. She wouldn’t even use the bathroom after him most times, and this time was far worse than any plague he’d unleashed on their own toilet at home.
So like a kid diving into a cold lake after the thaw, he plugged his nose and plunged his hand into the soupy bowl to feel around for the bags. His fingers caught one immediately, and he pulled it out, dripping gobs of wet filth on the rim of the bowl and the floor tiles. Plop—into the sink. Back into the bowl. Feel around. Grab a handful this time, no point making more trips than absolutely necessary, drip drip drip on the tile and the counter and plop into the sink. Up to the middle of his forearm with goopy black particles, but still he plunged in again, to his elbow this time, reaching deep into the bowl where it started to bend, and when he was done what felt like an eternity later, all told there were twenty-seven bags in the sink waiting to be cleaned and swallowed again.
Wash, rinse, repeat. Wash, rinse, repeat. That was his mantra now.
Flushing the toilet, the color of his stool troubled him, but he assumed it was something to do with the concoction of stomach pills he’d taken to keep the baggies down. If it was heroin in his system he knew he’d be dead already, a realization that came as cold comfort.
Curious, he peered into the bowl. A torn baggie floated on top, like a spent condom. He supposed it must have split on a fingernail when he was swamp fishing since he didn’t feel at all high—even the oxys had worn off at this point—and he figured Juicy wouldn’t quibble about one bag when there were still close to a hundred undamaged baggies left inside him.
‘Is it done yet?’ Jenny shouted at the door. He could hear the TV on in the room, one of her goddamn reality shows, a bunch of women yelling at each other for God knew what reason.
‘It’s done,’ he said. ‘But I can’t swallow these bags. I’m sick. I’m holding these ones in by the skin of my teeth. Just get in here, okay?’
He heard her exasperated sigh. A minute later the door opened, and she groaned, wafting away the lingering odor. ‘Jesus, Johnny, what the fuck?’
‘I dunno, it must be the pills. Something didn’t sit right.’
‘Well, you gotta get ’em back in there. Flight’s in two hours.’
‘You think I don’t know that? If I could swallow them I would, but they’re just gonna come right back out again. You got us into this fucking mess,’ he said, ‘you have to step up.’
‘Step up? You know I can’t swallow them—’
‘Then cram them up your twat for all I care!’
She slapped him then. Hard.
‘Look, you fucking do your share, or I’m walking,’ Johnny said, feeling good about standing up to her for once. It was like the bungie jumping, he was terrified walking up to the edge but once he jumped, it was all or nothing. ‘I’ve got nothing to lose.’
‘He’ll kill us, Johnny.’
‘It’s been a slice so far,’ Johnny said. ‘Maybe we’re better off.’
Suddenly Jenny was all sweet and nice again. She nestled up close to him, running her fingers on the back of his neck. ‘You don’t mean that,’ she said. ‘C’mon, Johnny… we had some fun.’
The fun was so long ago with so much disappointment in between he could barely remember their trip to Vegas, the bungie jumping, those first few dates getting to know each other, their first tentative kiss, and their giggling fumbles to get each other’s clothes off in the dark of her bedroom that first time. He pushed her away coldly.
‘You need to handle your business,’ he said, and the look on her face told the story of their relationship in the span of three seconds. She hauled back and punched him in the chest. Once, twice, three times he let her. When she tried to hit him a fourth time, he grabbed her fist and held it down.
‘The more you hit me, the more likely I am to shit the rest of these baggies into my pants,’ he said. ‘So go lie down on the bed and take off your jeans.’
‘What? You think I’m gonna let you rub up against me after all this? I hate you!’
‘I hate you, too,’ Johnny said, as sincere as he’d ever been. ‘But right now we’re a matching set of human luggage, and you need to get packing.’
Her face went pale. ‘What—?’ she said, so disgusted she couldn’t even finish the thought.
‘You heard what Juicy said. There are swallowers, and there are stuffers. You’ve stuffed me for the last time.’
‘I don’t even have a ticket…’ She was sullen, like a little girl who’d had her pigtails pulled in the playground one too many times.
‘We’ll get you a standby,’ Johnny said, and he nodded toward the bed. ‘Time’s a-wasting.’
Jenny shouldered past him into the room. She sat on the bed with an angry huff, and started to unbuckle her jeans. She pulled them down to her shins before taking off her runners, a weird habit that reminded Johnny of the first time they fooled around, her hopping around trying to get her heels off with her jeans already around her ankles.
She pulled her panties down past her skinned knees, and stood there in nothing but a T-shirt and her socks. She hadn’t shaved in the weeks since they’d stopped fooling around, and her dark bush was a stark contrast to her chalk-white skin and straggly blonde hair. Jenny stood there for a second, as if awaiting his next command, so Johnny said, ‘Go ahead and lay down.’
‘You’re an asshole, Johnny,’ she said. ‘When this is over—’
‘I never want to see you again,’ he finished for her. ‘Good to see we’re on the same page.’
Jenny laid back against the bed with her knees together. He came back with his hands full of baggies, and he set them down between her socked feet.
‘You want me to do it, or…?’
‘You wish. You’re never gonna touch my pussy again,’ Jenny said, her eyes darker than he’d ever seen them. But that twinkle was back, he noticed. Too little too late.
Jenny plucked up the first of the baggies, hesitating with it held near her pink slit. She told him to turn around, she couldn’t do it with him watching. Johnny did as he was told, but he promised himself it was the last time he’d let her tell him what to do.
A moment later he heard her grunting. ‘Don’t push too hard and break it,’ he told her.
‘You think I don’t know what I’m doing? It’s my body.’
‘I’m just saying—’
‘Well just say it to yourself,’ she mumbled. ‘If I get a goddamn yeast infection from these things, I swear I’m gonna kill you.’
Johnny heard the first baggie squish into her wet hole. Curious, he peeked over his shoulder.
‘Where’d you get that lube?’
‘From my purse,’ she said.
‘Why are you carrying around lube in your purse when I haven’t touched you in over a month, Jenny?’
She gave him a really hard look, and said, ‘Is that any of your business anymore?’
She was right. He thought about it and he found he couldn’t even muster up the energy to care. Whether she was just fucking Juicy to get smack or random strangers, it didn’t matter anymore. They were through.
‘Okay,’ she said, and he heard her grunt as she stood up to put her clothes back on. ‘It’s done. Let’s fucking do this.’
Johnny turned to find her pulling up her panties. Her belt jingled as she stepped into her jeans. Her belly bulged a bit where the twenty-seven bags of heroin sat in her vagina but once she got her jeans zipped up he barely even noticed the difference.
‘You got some makeup in there?’ he asked her, pointing at her purse as she put the lube back.
‘I need some?’
‘You haven’t had a shower in three days and you’ve been shooting up for a month. What do you think?’
Grumbling, Jenny made her way past him to the bathroom. From her expression in the mirror, he’d given her a sobering reality check. ‘You’re right, I look like shit.’
She started putting on blush, and somewhere during this Johnny pulled his attention away from the rich housewives fighting on the TV and caught her eye.
‘I’m sorry, Johnny,’ she said, one eye closed to apply eye shadow. ‘This all got way out of hand. I just wanted us to have some fun, is all.’
‘We had some fun,’ he admitted.
‘We did, didn’t we?’ She closed the other eye and applied makeup. ‘It wasn’t all bad.’
He agreed with a solemn nod, approaching the bathroom door.
Jenny smiled, but her smile turned into a wince. ‘Ow,’ she said. She said it again, only this time she dropped the makeup applicator in the sink and grabbed her abdomen.
‘What? What is it?’
‘Cramps,’ she moaned. ‘Oh God, it’s real bad, Johnny.’
She doubled over and stumbled out of the bathroom, then sat down on the bed and started breathing like they teach you in Lamaze class, like she’s about to give birth. After what he’d just been through on the toilet, he could sympathize. He sat down beside her, worried for a second that she’d try to push him away again, but then she let out a pained, pitiful moan, like an animal dying in the woods, and Johnny knew she was beyond fighting.
‘I’m gonna call an ambulance,’ he said, getting up for the rotary dial phone, but Jenny reached out blindly, begging him not to.
‘I’ll be… fine,’ she said, and then she groaned, ‘Oh God!’ like she used to when she rode him cowgirl, the only way he could get her off, and her eyes rolled back, only the rest of her went back with them, falling onto the bedspread.
Johnny sat beside her, slapping her cheek to wake her up. Her eyelids fluttered but she didn’t move, didn’t make a sound. He pulled open one of her eyes. The pupil was huge, nearly as wide as the iris.
Panicked, Johnny put his mouth over hers and blew into it. Her lips were dry, and he couldn’t feel her breath when he cupped his palm over them. He didn’t know what to do. All those times he’d found her on the bed curled up like a baby it never once occurred to him to look up medical procedures for an overdose. He’d never even taken a single CPR class. Now she was dying, and even though he’d willed her to die a dozen times or more in the past month he couldn’t just let it happen now.
Johnny unzipped her jeans and tugged them down over her knees. He pulled down her panties, still damp and smelling like the chemical strawberry flavor of the lube and the tang of her unwashed pussy. Her dull eyes stared at the ceiling as he pushed through a tangle of pubic hair and stuck a finger inside of her, then two.
Without the lube, retrieving the bags would have likely been impossible. He thought if he could manage to get the bags out before more of them broke from her cramping and the heroin all seeped into her bloodstream, he might be able to save her life.
‘Come on, Jenny, don’t die, not now,’ he prayed.
Curling his hand into a beak shape, he pushed it in, his knuckles grazing against her pubic bone from the inside, the tight lip of flesh slipping over his thumb as he slid in up to the wrist. Once inside, he stretched his fingers to the outer edges of her hot fleshy canal, the dark pucker below widening and clenching under the pressure of his wrist. His fingers found one, feeling around blindly in the wet spongy tissue, then a second, and he pulled them out gingerly with a sucking sound, her hole remaining open like a look of surprise before closing to its normal size.
He put the baggies on the mattress and went back in for the others.
By the time he’d removed the second to last bag, her insides had started to cool, and the lube and natural lubricant her body had produced had thickened to a sticky white froth so it felt like stuffing a turkey. He couldn’t find the broken bag, the one that had killed her. She might have pushed it up so far it broke from the pressure against her cervix. Or one of her fingernails had done it. He supposed he’d never know.
His fingers found something small and fleshy. He slipped it into his palm, holding it there with his thumb, and worked his hand back out.
Johnny’s stomach rebelled when he opened his fist. He fell back on his ass, and the squishy, purplish thing plopped down wetly on the carpet.
Johnny shook his head.
It looked like a giblet, like something you might find in an egg yolk, only about an inch long. He couldn’t tell if it was alive or dead. Who’s was it? he wondered. Too mature to be Juicy’s. It must have been at least eight weeks old from the length of it, and Johnny was pretty certain Jenny hadn’t met the dealer until after she’d met Johnny.
Who’s baby was it?
He didn’t know. All he knew for sure was it wasn’t his.
He thought about fate, and choices, and of all the places in all the world, Juicy had to go and pick this goddamn room to meet.
According to the clock on the bed, Johnny had an hour and a half until the flight. He’d have to get there soon if he wanted to make it. And after all he’d been through, he realized he wanted to finish the job. He needed something to hold on to, something to take his mind off what had happened today, and everything that had lead up to it.
He’d never felt more empty than he did right now.
Best to finish packing.
Johnny swallowed the first white-crusted bag dry while the corpse of the woman he’d once loved stiffened beside him on the mattress, and her unborn child shriveled on the carpet.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
