Crepuscular

The trip was over and we had nowhere to go.

I don’t know how long we’d been tripping for by that point. Hours and hours and hours, light ones and dark ones, and some surprisingly cold ones, for late spring; then again, it was night.

It was hard to tell how we’d gotten there, this stoop on 9th Street and 6th Avenue, across from a building where I’d been a number of times to visit friends of my dad’s. Those warm, indoor times, when I felt oppressed by every layer of clothing, the smell of wool, the threads, hairs, wisps that billowed in any strong beam of sunlight. It would be nice to be indoors now, I thought.

We only had a couple of hours until school would start. It was these last few hours that were tough; the rest of the trip had been great, I assume, so great that when the opportunity to stay out all night instead of going to Hope’s came up, we chose, of course, to stay out all night. Who wouldn’t? We were too fucked up to deal with her mom; we went to a pay phone and made our calls and told our mothers we were sleeping at Alice’s. Alice wasn’t even with us.

So now, in the gloaming of 4:30 a.m., 5 a.m., the brown stone cold under our asses, there was no place to be. Once you signed out for the night, you didn’t come crawling in at 4:30 or 5. We didn’t have money to buy a coffee so we could sit inside, and frankly if we’d sat down anywhere comfortable I would have fallen dead asleep. Sleep is hard when you’re tripping, your racing mind and loud heart gets in the way, but I was coming down from the trip, and I thought I could do it, if I tried.

There came a point in the coming down process where you asked yourself, “Am I still tripping?”, and then tried to make both cases – if you even had to ask the question, you were still tripping; but if you were aware enough to feel the effects start to wane, causing you to question your state, then you were not really tripping anymore. It was all academic anyway; sober life was the period between taking drugs, which didn’t last long, if we could help it. At the very least, cigarettes and strong coffee made things sharper, took me away from the baseline, a line I never wanted to touch.

Crepuscular. I didn’t know that word back then, senior year of high school, almost finished. A sunny May day in Central Park, we got off work around 7:30 p.m., and there were still a few people around in the waning orange light. It didn’t seem dark until the streetlights went on, and then, ironically, you could see it.

Someone must have sold us two hits of acid, or maybe Hope had them and we saved them for after work, in which case we had definitely fucked ourselves – acid lasts for 8 to 10 hours. We’d be going until 6 a.m. We could both tell time and do math, especially when relatively sober, so I don’t know why, at that late hour, we chose to shrug and pop the tabs anyway, except that we didn’t really give much of a shit about anything, and we had the power to close our eyes to logic with great ease.

Crepuscular. It means an animal that’s most active at dusk and dawn. It sounds monstrous – the word, not the definition – and at that time of near-day, with nobody on the streets except the rough trade, it was monstrous. We were monstrous. Hope, who was never happy about anything, which made everyone around her that much more desperate to see her pleased. How did that work? I did my best to agree with everyone around me, not to complain or cause trouble, and nobody cared at all about my comfort.

But I was a monster too. Nobody knew what kind of hatred I held in my heart, the many murders I committed everyday. I’d once planned to kill my stepfather by nicotine poisoning, which I’d read about in Hustler Magazine, I think; you boiled a bunch of cigarettes into a thick, pungent liquid, and then somehow got the motherfucker to drink it. My stepfather smoked Camel unfiltereds from morning to midnight: they would have never suspected foul play, I thought. It was not any crisis of conscience, just sheer laziness, that kept me from executing my plan.

I hated. I wanted. I needed. Hope next to me on the stoop, her hands clasped in prayer position between her knees, her head hung, then lifted to the sky, then hung again. She too was cold, exhausted, and worst of all bored. Hope took boredom so personally; it was something done intentionally to hurt her, and since I was the only person around at that moment, she was angry at me. I forced her to be cold and tripping and tired and near dead from boredom. If only I’d had someplace for us to go, she would hate me less.

Did we talk? Did we repeat the same few phrases – “I wish it was 8, already,” “I’m so fucking tired,” “I can’t believe I’m out of cigarettes,” “I wish we had a joint or something” – back and forth to each other? Waiting was the thing we were worst at, and yet it seemed to be the only thing we did. For me, even the awful things were exciting. Even this night, as much as I wished it would end, imbued me with a sense of freedom, wildness, anticipation. To be outdoors, to breath the outdoors inside of me, the moisture in the air now a fog in my lungs, the taste of the street in my nose. Vibrating at a very high pitch. There’s something pure about that kind of emptiness, being pushed up against the limits of what you can bear. Of course I’m romanticizing it now. But the strain, that’s what let me know I was still there.

The sun was going to come up soon. It got colder before it got warmer. It wasn’t light but it wasn’t dark; we’d seemed to have reached a homeostasis of light where things were uniformly grey and fuzzy. The doorman of the building across the street stepped outside for some air. We were the type of thing he was hired to keep out of the building. I thought about walking over with Hope, telling him we were there to see the Steins in 10G, just to show him that we were as good as anybody else. It could have been us living under his protection. We could have lied down on the carpet in the hallway and slept.

Trucks, that’s all we’d heard for the last hour; the thu-thunk as they hit the metal plate covering a pothole in the middle of 6th Ave. Cabs. A man hooting from somewhere west of us, unintelligible. A woman with a cart lined with a black garbage bag. Some birds – what birds? Pigeons didn’t sing, did they? Sparrows, maybe. A Sanitation truck with its loud, round brushes scraping the streets.

The grey got paler. It was time to crepusculate.

A few people had started to trickle from the PATH station across the street. They didn’t notice us, two kids on a stoop; we were the color of the surroundings, grey and brown. They had more important things on their minds, or so they thought. We didn’t notice them either, except that they existed, they were regular people, you saw them all the time in life and hoped never to become one. They wore uninteresting clothes and had unoriginal ideas. They had no idea what kind of epiphanies were available to them if only they took acid. We were clearly better than them; if they’d seen us sitting there in the bland, lint-colored morning, they would know we’d had a night unlike any they’d ever experienced, and they would envy us. I felt very beautiful and forlorn and lucky and terrible at the same time.

I saw it all the time. Old people, people over 30, envied us. They tried to make it look like disgust, the looks they shot us as we passed them on the sidewalk, but it was easy to identify it as anger. We had everything they wanted and could never get back. We had smooth skin, and futures. They were the ones with the apartments and the autonomy, and yet I saw them as prisoners of the stupid boring relationships they’d forged with other stupid boring people. They were slaves to their bosses, spouses, children, mortgages, churches. There was not one thing that any one of those people could have told me that I didn’t already know. It was hard, being so much smarter and more aware than anybody else in the world.

What time was it? The clock on the Jefferson Library said it was 5:45. Two hours to go, until we would peel ourselves from where we were stuck, the grip of the rough stone giving just enough catch to make it seem difficult, and walk slowly towards school, about 15 blocks away. People would start collecting on the corner as early as 8; they would have cigarettes and money we could borrow; we’d get some coffee. Two more hours, though, and nothing to make them go any faster. Hope was now looking east down the street, turned away from me. The acid had to have been my idea, or if it wasn’t, I should have said something. I should have been Alice, with an apartment we could have gone home to around 1, when things first started to get flaky.

There’s Beto, she said, perturbed, perplexed. She was still tripping, though; Beto wasn’t going to be wandering around at this time of the morning down this exact street at this exact moment. And yet, there he was, blond and sleepy-eyed, stoned even when he wasn’t. What’s up, he said, pulling up to the stoop. What are you guys doing?

As impossible as it had seemed that Beto would have walked by our random stoop at 5:55 a.m., now it seemed impossible that he hadn’t been there all along. Nothing, said Hope. We were tripping, and now we’re just waiting, I guess. He looked over our heads at something far away. Hey, I said, do you have a cigarette?

He said, I was just about to ask you.

He fell into our silence. There was nothing to say. We were tripping, and now we were waiting. Waiting to go somewhere, anywhere inside. My eyes were too dry to close. My hands were grimy and bloated, and the purple veins looked like rot. The skin molted off our bones. Beto was on something too but it didn’t matter what. Nobody had anything to spare. We’d spent it all, earlier in the night, when we put the tabs on our tongues and rolled ourselves on to the street like marbles down hills.

The trip was over and we had nowhere to go. Nights like these were never ending. They were all the same night. Time stopped, in the darkest-before-dawn, while we waited for a morning we didn’t believe in and wouldn’t trust when it came. And I pass that stoop today, and it turned out we were right, it really was endless. We’re still there. There’s a part of that night, and every night like it, where we’re still sitting there, waiting for day.

(2017)