Contributor: William Clifford
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Who can sleep anymore? Not me. Not after Heather. Not after Marvin. My bed belongs to my cat. Sleep has become a foreign country. I can’t speak the language. I stumble along, never quite understanding, taking wrong turns. I squint. I stagger into a bodega on Avenue B to buy a beer and the cashier demands 64,000 dong. I reach into my pocket and produce a trembling handful of pesos. And my hands, they’re not good, they’re bad, they shake. My cigarettes are sparklers. My bad hands are probably the result my nightly bouts of Homeric drinking, but who knows? A neurologist might know, but I’m too nervous to see one. What is going on?
I know what isn’t going on-- rock and roll and sex. There is, however, a fair amount of drugs: a little of this, a lot of that; a lot of this, a little of that. Contrary to popular opinion, I find that drugs don’t actually lead to sex and rock and roll, but rather to deeply private bouts of near suicidal isolation, hours spent in a worn chair wondering why you don’t have prettier hands: a pianist’s hands, a poet’s hands, a surgeon’s hands. You could marry a manicurist and still be waving around your catcher’s mitts.
But what was I saying? Oh, right, this is about my bad hands and a girl who fell in love with them.
Her name was Heather and she had no arms. Well, partial arms (a parasailing accident as a child). I met her at rehab. I didn’t go to get clean, really, I simply wanted my fidgety digits to stop shaking invisible maracas—guided meditations, acupuncture, chanting, anything. (Anything that didn’t require me getting on the wagon. I don’t like wagons, they’re rickety, and those poor horses.).
Anyway, Heather was the med nurse. Snazzy artificial limbs started slipping me Librium and we hit it off like gangbusters. In no time at all I had the hands of a statue—an ugly statue, but still.
And you probably know what happened next: after my release I casually and then vehemently relapsed into all things designed to make you feel like a king and then kill you. Heather quit her job and moved to New York to be with me, or to relapse with me. In any case, she relapsed too and it wasn’t long before we were living on the street together, begging and shooting smack. Obviously, I leant her a hand. I shot her between her toes. Things weren’t looking so good, but then her father died. That helped. Apparently her father was a wealthy Coca-Cola man who loved his daughter. Within a month we went from sleeping on piss-soaked cardboard to sleeping on piss-soaked 700 thread-count sheets at the W hotel. My hands were still stubby little monsters with vile little nails, but thanks to the heroin, pretty steady. A year later we found our way back to rehab, cleaned up, moved to Pittsburgh, and opened a coffee shop called Rehab. People seemed to like it. Then we got married and, on our wedding night, she told me I had the loveliest hands she’d ever seen, and kissed each and every one of my calm, reptilian fingers. I knew she was lying, but god how I loved her for it. And that was us, Heather and me, happily ever after, until she met and ran off with a professional bowler and part-time hand model named Marvin. That’s when I sold Rehab and moved back to New York.
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A few words on my background: after winning an MTV short story contest, I was first published as the lead story in a book called Pieces: A Collection Of New Voices (MTV/Pocket Books). I have had short stories published in Zembla: The New International Literary Magazine (#5-Rachael Weisz), out of London, and in the literary journals Opium and Fiction, the book, The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide (Harper Perennial). My fiction has also appeared on the literary websites citywriters.com and monkeybicycle.com
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Who can sleep anymore? Not me. Not after Heather. Not after Marvin. My bed belongs to my cat. Sleep has become a foreign country. I can’t speak the language. I stumble along, never quite understanding, taking wrong turns. I squint. I stagger into a bodega on Avenue B to buy a beer and the cashier demands 64,000 dong. I reach into my pocket and produce a trembling handful of pesos. And my hands, they’re not good, they’re bad, they shake. My cigarettes are sparklers. My bad hands are probably the result my nightly bouts of Homeric drinking, but who knows? A neurologist might know, but I’m too nervous to see one. What is going on?
I know what isn’t going on-- rock and roll and sex. There is, however, a fair amount of drugs: a little of this, a lot of that; a lot of this, a little of that. Contrary to popular opinion, I find that drugs don’t actually lead to sex and rock and roll, but rather to deeply private bouts of near suicidal isolation, hours spent in a worn chair wondering why you don’t have prettier hands: a pianist’s hands, a poet’s hands, a surgeon’s hands. You could marry a manicurist and still be waving around your catcher’s mitts.
But what was I saying? Oh, right, this is about my bad hands and a girl who fell in love with them.
Her name was Heather and she had no arms. Well, partial arms (a parasailing accident as a child). I met her at rehab. I didn’t go to get clean, really, I simply wanted my fidgety digits to stop shaking invisible maracas—guided meditations, acupuncture, chanting, anything. (Anything that didn’t require me getting on the wagon. I don’t like wagons, they’re rickety, and those poor horses.).
Anyway, Heather was the med nurse. Snazzy artificial limbs started slipping me Librium and we hit it off like gangbusters. In no time at all I had the hands of a statue—an ugly statue, but still.
And you probably know what happened next: after my release I casually and then vehemently relapsed into all things designed to make you feel like a king and then kill you. Heather quit her job and moved to New York to be with me, or to relapse with me. In any case, she relapsed too and it wasn’t long before we were living on the street together, begging and shooting smack. Obviously, I leant her a hand. I shot her between her toes. Things weren’t looking so good, but then her father died. That helped. Apparently her father was a wealthy Coca-Cola man who loved his daughter. Within a month we went from sleeping on piss-soaked cardboard to sleeping on piss-soaked 700 thread-count sheets at the W hotel. My hands were still stubby little monsters with vile little nails, but thanks to the heroin, pretty steady. A year later we found our way back to rehab, cleaned up, moved to Pittsburgh, and opened a coffee shop called Rehab. People seemed to like it. Then we got married and, on our wedding night, she told me I had the loveliest hands she’d ever seen, and kissed each and every one of my calm, reptilian fingers. I knew she was lying, but god how I loved her for it. And that was us, Heather and me, happily ever after, until she met and ran off with a professional bowler and part-time hand model named Marvin. That’s when I sold Rehab and moved back to New York.
- - -
A few words on my background: after winning an MTV short story contest, I was first published as the lead story in a book called Pieces: A Collection Of New Voices (MTV/Pocket Books). I have had short stories published in Zembla: The New International Literary Magazine (#5-Rachael Weisz), out of London, and in the literary journals Opium and Fiction, the book, The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide (Harper Perennial). My fiction has also appeared on the literary websites citywriters.com and monkeybicycle.com
Author:
William Clifford
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