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fucking BLISS .”) Her sometime boyfriend Donnie, who might have also been her brother, but said he was her agent, spent five hours explaining how he actually thought up the “Squirt” concept in your dealer’s doublewide; a model so spectacularly lush it had a hot tub. Donnie was one of those Valley porn guys who had gone into “lawn care.” Strictly legit. But still. Drunk, with some crank flecks in his Magnum, P.I . crumb-catcher, he’d go all misty-eyed. Sigh right at you over the tub-scum frothing his chin. You weren’t supposed to get into hot tubs on amphetamines. Guys got heart attacks. So Donnie told you. A little too enthusiastically. “Time it well, you go right to the edge, kiss a coronary on the mouth …” Then, wrapped in a beach towel, he’d pull out his wallet and unfold a yellowed issue of the long defunct L.A. Reader . (He did this more than once, pretty much nightly.) Once he unfolded and smoothed it, he’d let you see the picture of him, the cover story, young and smiling, wearing the same hair as Harry Reems, posed in a Hawaiian shirt with his arm around what may or not may not have been an underage Tahitian woman. In the photo her red nails were visible, fingers wrapped up to the mouth blowjob-style around a swirly-glassed green bottle of old-fashioned Squirt soda pop. The headline’s in BOLD LETTERS over his Reems hair: NOT YOUR FATHER’S SQUIRT . Under the soft drink, in smaller print, the kicker: Is it marketing if my new wife does it? Below that—and you remember, because you knew the guy whose uncle laid out the cover, a total crankaholic whose aorta was going to pop on a bus in three years—below that, in the so-small-only-speedfreaks-would-notice thought balloon superimposed over the Belle of the South Pacific: Would you believe it, my little Roxy can write her name on the ceiling! (There is a world of secret messages when you’re really hitting the pep pills. Reality is a crossword puzzle you can solve in your head—until you forget what words are.)
    It’s like you’re outside and it’s ten in the morning, and the sun is just scorching the rubber T-shirt you never saw before in your life. Which you realize after you’ve been peeling it off for half a day is actually your skin. You take a deep breath, groan out a rush that makes your fingernails itch, and suddenly dialogue that explains everything is projected in the sky. The letters remind you of your father’s eyes, except you don’t feel the seething. This is what this means , the letters say. That is what that means . Did you mention how sometimes your eyes bleed? You could write a book about bleeding eyeballs. The more that wants more wants more, and the more that can’t do anymore wants more too . One day you wake up and you’re letting your appetite sign your checks. You know that feeling? What was my name again?
    IN THE DE-SPEED WING
    DAY ONE. You write a poem with doorbell and cerebellum appearing in the same sentence thirty-six times. They give you something for the shakes and put an ice cube in your mouth, which cracks badly at the corners. Your blood appears to be plaid.
    DAY TWO. A counselor later to become famous in a rehab reality show keeps asking you in group what “your deal” is. After the fifth time, when he’s standing right over you, you finally start to answer and he laughs and yells in your face from two inches away. “ Bullshit! ” It’s not your fault there are secret webs between things; that with enough amphetamine in your system, you see DEEP AND MEANINGFUL PATTERNS among seemingly random phenomena. How it all CONNECTS. After that you think— So what?
    You are tired of not being a centipede. You just want a patch of dirt, somewhere you do not have to keep pretending to know how to be human.
    DAY THREE. Circle the date, you’re well enough for restraints! A Kush-breath orderly straps