Needles & Sins (22 page)

After she was six feet under, we got back in the car and headed back the way we’d come, three hours now behind the band and the bus, but plenty of time to make our gig that night in Des Moines. We never spoke of it again.

And I never drank Rolling Rock again.

So it made a cruel bit of sense that I was lost somewhere, in the middle of a field, being bitten by the teeth of a green bottle. I wiped more of the wet blood off my hand and onto my thigh, and gingerly put my toes back to the ground, limping forward slowly, and peering more intently at the ground between the dead shoots of grass.

It was well that I did…just a couple feet away, I narrowly missed planting my heel on another broken green bottle. And then just beyond that, I saw another just in time. I could feel a warm slick of blood cover my heel, leaving a trail on the ground as I navigated a crooked path between the bottles, expecting the maze of glass to diminish once the remains of the frat boy or high school delinquent party was behind, but instead, the teeth of glass only grew more frequent. My eyes now fixated soley on the ground, as I played a cruel game of twister to avoid a growing mash of jagged, angry glass.

The ground became easier and easier to see, and then it occurred to me that the grass had completely stopped its incessant slicing and itching against my bare thighs, and I looked up to see before me, not a field, but a sea of liquid green.

Glass.

As far as I could see, the ground overflowed with bottles, white labels jeering at me like vampiric teeth, begging me to walk this way. And they weren’t just lying about on the ground. They were stacked on each other, deep and dangerous as the eye could see. The bones of my sin. A narrow dirt path continued from the edge of the field through the maze of broken bottles.

I stood still, looking around me for the first time in an hour, and taking in the change in scenery. Ahead of me, the ground glittered in the waiting fangs of Rolling Rock; behind me stemmed suffocating sheaves of death. To my right, the meeting line of death and murder, weaved an uneven, but mostly barren path through the glass.

I walked on.

It was surreal, I thought. The stillness. It seemed as if I hadn’t heard a noise in hours. Not even a whisper of breeze across the endless expanses of grass and glass. I tried to remember how I’d come to be here, but nothing came. The past few days were a foggy blur of rowdy concerts at falling down dive bars and late night after show parties. I shook my head to clear the cobwebs, but there was no clarity. And oddly, no hangover.

The trail led crookedly up one hill and down the next. At each peak I prayed to find a new scene on the other side—a valley. A river. Something. But every hill seemed to lead into another vista filled with broken green glass. And the thin dirt path through the center. My foot throbbed, and I didn’t dare to look at how much mud I’d ground into the wound. There’d be time for disinfectant later. Now, I just needed to find water. And food. My stomach strangled in pain, and my legs felt heavier with every step. Everything seemed to have taken on the sickening emerald green sheen of Rolling Rock. The glass stretched to the horizon, and even the stagnant blue of the sky seemed to be leaching its color.

Alex is going to be pissed,
I thought, imagining our tour manager going from hotel room to hotel room and asking the guys where I was. Unless he was in on it. Maybe the bunch of them had drugged me and dropped me here. And the path was my only way out…I’d
kill
them.

A flash of Amy’s face at that thought, green dagger twisting out of her ruined eyeball, mouth hanging open in shock at my betrayal, blood coating the purity of that soft face…

I shook my head and staggered on, determined not to think of her. I had managed to almost forget about that night, at times. A steady diet of alcohol helped. Still, her ghost whispered in my lyrics and what could I do about that? She haunted my soul and always would. I couldn’t deny my damnation, so I celebrated it, flaunted it in song. And the hits kept coming…for awhile.

Another hill and I weaved up its face, careful not to step off the steep path and gouge another wound in my aching feet. My body felt light, almost ethereal. I’d stopped sweating. I was walking on air. I was probably about to collapse, I thought.

And then I reached the top. I looked out over the next valley, and gasped.

In the distance, I could see a town. Or, more specifically, the entry to a street lined with buildings. I let out a cheer, but nothing broke the stillness of the landscape. I was so dry and worn that I couldn’t utter a sound. I staggered down the path towards this oasis, almost falling down the far side of the hill before staggering to an abrupt stop.

The path was interrupted.

It simply stopped at the bottom of the hill, and picked up again at the beginning of the next, where it led to the street above.

In between were thousands of broken bottles, stacked one on top of the other, all of them leering at me, jagged ends pointing toward the sky.

All of them green. Without a trace of earth to be seen.

I fell to the ground, but no tears came. I was too dehydrated to cry.

After awhile, I stood again, and stared out across the deadly sea of glass. It was only 15 or 20 yards to the other side, but it looked like a mile. How could I cross it? I had no clothes to bind my feet in, and nothing around for miles that I could use to create steppingstones through the abyss. I couldn’t go back; I wasn’t sure I had the strength left to climb the hill ahead to the town, let alone walk for hours back to the middle-of-nowhere place I’d awoken, only to begin a trek in the other direction that could prove equally as endless.

I had only two choices: Step gingerly across the glass, letting each blade sink slowly into my feet as I crossed. Or take a running start and hurl myself across the glass, with each step gouging rougher, deeper wounds. But I would probably have to take fewer steps that way.

My shoulders shook in empty cries with the horror of my choices. If I lost my balance from the pain, my entire body would be slashed and I might not be able to get back up. If I ran, the worst pain would be over sooner, but my feet might be shredded beyond repair. If I didn’t run, they still might be ruined, unless I could find a path across stepping only on the most shallow of pieces.

I forced myself to stop thinking about it and walked back the way I had come. I wouldn’t think about it. I wouldn’t imagine the blood blossoming from my feet, the green knives hungrily puncturing my skin, skewering my entire foot until the razor tips peeked through the other side, drenched in shavings of bone and awash in my blood. I wouldn’t…

I turned and ran full force at the glass, stretching my legs to long strides, leaping at the very edge of the boundary between grey baked earth and broken blades of deadly glass.

The pain exploded through my right foot, and then the white-hot stabbing took my left. I screamed, opening my mouth in a cry to heaven that echoed like an explosion in my brain, but made no sound. The world remained strangely silent, and I was a hurtling body of unheard pain. I couldn’t look down, but forced myself to lift and stomp my right foot again, my knees threatening to buckle beneath me in fear rather than move again. I could feel the glass slicing easily through the soft soles of my feet, first as a warm burst of slippery heat, then as an excruciating stab. It was worst when I lifted my foot off the blade, feeling the jagged glass slip out, leaving a screaming vacuum in its wake that vomited blood and torn flesh.

The first steps were bad, but with the fourth and fifth time, my feet came down on knives that chewed and tore the skin and muscle relentlessly. I was in agony. My mouth opened in a silent, ghastly scream that I couldn’t stop and I thrust my arms forward, yearning for the other side.

I closed my eyes in pain and forced myself to lift my left foot again, and felt a shard of glass snap, leaving a piece of itself lodged in the ball of my foot. When I set my foot down, glass ground against glass against bone and I choked in horror. The pain shot up and down my calves, and I stumbled at last, falling to impale my thigh and left hand on broken bottles. Darts of fire pained every inch of the left side of my body.

“Why?” I cried as the green glass slipped out through the back of my hand, and the pain swam wetly through my belly like a shark’s bite. Something hot spread across my ribs and side, and I could feel more teeth sinking into my thigh and calf, but I didn’t look down.

I stared at my hand; the green glass looked surreal married to the sickly pale caste of my skin. Strange how there was no blood. No blood at all. I was a sculpture of flesh and bone and glass. A twisted crucifixion of man and bottle. I swam above the pain for a moment, marveling.

And then the blood came, seeping out along the jagged edge of glass like the ocean through sand at high tide. It pooled in my hand, rising up slowly to drip over my palm and down the edge of a green knife. As I watched it drool down the broken bottle out of sight, a glint of something that wasn’t glass caught my eye from below. I pushed the bottle to the side and gingerly reached down to pry it up. It felt hard and rounded between my fingers, dry as a chalky stick. I pulled and bottles shifted to set it free. Part of it rose above the surface of the glass but it did not break free; some bit was still connected to something below the bottles.

Stretched out from the deadly green sea was a skeletal hand. A silver dragon ring hung loosely on its fourth finger, matching the jewelry on my own. We were mirror images of life and death shaking hands between two realms. Was this, then, where I was to end?

The pain came back full force, and I dropped the bones. Burning fire singed my hand and arm and leg and feet and I looked ahead of me, gauging the distance to the last of the broken bottles. Just a few more steps. I had to get up and move now, and I had to sacrifice my feet to get there or I would sacrifice myself.

I levered myself upright, ignoring the new shards that carved whatever flesh was left on my feet, and put one foot down on a broken bottle. It shifted beneath me, slipping away from my step as another rolled up from beneath it to stab me again. And so it went.

When I collapsed to the ground on the far side of the sea of bottles, my body was shaking in shock, and covered with gaping, ugly wounds. I gasped for breath that wouldn’t come and wiped my bloody hand across the hair of my chest to clean it enough to see the size of the puncture through my palm. The center of my hand manifested the stigmata. My lifeline had been gouged into two raw lips an inch long that gleamed with the acid spit of blood. Already it had swollen to twice its normal size, but I could still move my fingers, so nothing crucial had been severed. It might heal.

My feet were another story. There was no skin that I could see left on the bottoms; several stab wounds had pierced through the flesh and bone to come out the other side. They looked like raw meat. I could see the white of bone when the blood flowed right.

I could not stand. Leaning on my right side, I began to crawl up the hill towards the city street so far above. I tried to call for help, but no sound came. I was mute, and the world leered back, unspeaking.

The temptation to lie still grew overpowering but I kept moving. If I stopped, I’d never move again. I looked back, and saw the evidence of my passage. A bony arm, grasping for purchase from the depths of the white-flecked green sea. The bottles glittered red across the center of the glass river, and the dirt nearby was streaked with damp spots and crimson pools where I’d rested briefly. How much more blood could I lose? I wondered.

How long I climbed, I couldn’t say. Every inch was a struggle, every yard left a piece of me behind. But finally, beneath the unheeding cloudless blue of the sky, I reached the top of the hill. I took in a deep breath, willing the fire of my body to cool, and stared down a street I knew so well.

Hartford Street. Newfordville.

My home town.

The band had started out here, a bunch of cocky high school kids we were, with bad hair, acne and a thirst for coke and vodka. And an all-encompassing love of music. Jack and Chuck played bass and drums in the marching band, and I played keys and fancied myself a poet. We found Randy through Chuck’s older brother. He was a dropout, working the stock room at the supermarket every night and jamming away on his guitar to Led Zeppelin CDs during the day.

There, a few doors down, was the Guitar Shack we’d spent hours at, drooling over the latest amps and effects pedals. There was The Hole, a narrow bar with a stage about the size of a dining room table. We’d played there every month for a year before packing everything into Randy’s van and doing our first “regional tour” which basically meant playing a hundred dives just like The Hole for little more to show for it than gas money to get to the next place. We had slept in the van and lived on McDonald’s.

Nobody was out on the street, though it was the middle of the afternoon, and I began to inchworm my way down the cement sidewalk, heading towards The Hole. Nick ought to have the place opened by now, and he’d get me some help fast. And a drink.

I pulled myself up to kneel at his door, and turned the knob. It fell open.

The floor was clean from last night’s excesses, but the chairs were all still upside down on the bar’s tiny round tables.

“Nick,” I called out, but my voice was still gone.

“Fuck it,” I said to myself, and dragged my body inside, heading behind the bar. I needed water and I needed it
now
.