Читать книгу Still Standing - Bucky Sinister - Страница 6

People around town kept telling me Razor was looking for me, that he was out of San Quentin. That's not the sort of thing most people want to hear. Razor was a close friend though, a friend both in our poetry lives and our drug lives. We used to get high and the next thing you know, it was three days later. We had little drug adventures that I vaguely remembered in montage sequences. We were also comrades in this strange clique of poets that my life centered around.

We were the kind of poets who shot dope in the bathrooms before going onstage, the kind that smoked crack in the alley and lost our poems, the kind that didn't get drunk so much as stayed drunk. The academics hated us and no one else liked us. We went to poetry readings where there was heckling and fights, and brought the chaos with us to other readings.

Hearing about Razor made me nervous. There was no way I could hang out with him casually with the levels of drugs and alcohol he consumed. But finally, a mutual friend told me he was clean and sober and looking for meetings. We finally hooked up and went to a meeting together.

Since then, when we talk, it's usually about our ideas on addiction, recovery, and sobriety, how two idiots like us can manage to live like clean and sober people, when we have little to no practice. We used to spend hour after hour while high and drunk, telling stories and laughing. Now, we still spend hours yakking away, only we don't need the drugs or alcohol.

It turns out we were real friends all along. It wasn't the drugs or the scene, it was true friendship. I don't have many people from that earlier part of my life anymore. It's good to have someone to count on, a solid man who's always there when I need him.

Razor, you're my brother, I love you, I'm glad I got to keep you. This book's for you.