78 - Rock Bottom

     I woke up at 9:30 am to a message on my cell phone.  I was up late surfing the
web and watching season three of some show on DVD so I didn’t hear the phone vibrate at
6:30 in the morning.
     “Hey…it’s Paris,” said the husky, burnt out voice on my voicemail.  I hadn’t
officially talked to her in almost three months.  I would send her a text message once a
week asking if she were dead.  Her usual response was ‘Fuck you’.
     She called a week ago to hang out with Kiki but once again she was a no show, no
call.
     “It’s all fucked up…all fucked up.”  I could hear the car door dinging in the
background.  “Call me back…later…”she whispered.  I hear her fumble with the phone and
then finally hang it up.
     I used to get calls like this from Caitlin years ago so I knew how to block it out. 
Unlike Caitlin Paris was a friend of mine so I gave her a bit more leeway.  She always
seemed to pull herself out of the gutter before but this was different.
     Since her last break up she had dipped deeper into the cocaine.  Her responses
weren’t witty or quick they were sluggish and predictable.  From what I heard her once
stunning appearance had dulled.  She had been blowing off her long term friends more and
more for a ‘newer, more with it’ crew.  Her priorities had changed and not for the better.
 I suspected and had heard rumors of the glass pipe but I didn’t want to believe it.
     My Dad was in the final stages of cancer, I was back at a corporate job working
twelve hours a day with an hour fifteen minute commute each way, and I was trying not to
fall apart at the seams so my plate was full.
     I was waiting for her to hit rock bottom.  Once she hit rock bottom we could begin. 
The purgatory of her painful past would catch up with her.  At first Kiki and I tried to
slow the fall but there was always some young boy toy that she would disappear with for a
weekend bender.  She had to want the change but the new sycophants around her let her
continue to think everything was all right.  I had written her off for dead two or three
times already.
     I called her cell phone and it went straight to voicemail.
     “What’s up, it’s me.  Give me a call.”  I hung up the phone and went back to sleep. 
It was a long weekend.  Any time I had a chance to sleep late on a Monday I took it.  From
the sound of her voice her response would have been ‘Fuck you’ anyway.

That Beautiful Black Man