Personal Narrative: Crack Addiction

Our first encounter in this sinkhole of a house didn’t go over well: you might even say we hated each other. He was a conspiracy theorist, that much I knew, and he made it easy, dressed up like he was auditioning for the part of token Crack Addict.

At first glance I thought today had to be Halloween, this man had to be trick-or-treating.

I was wrong. Really he was crazy.
But he wasn’t crack addict crazy so much as sad crazy, the kind that lends itself to hoarders and tired old men who die alone and remain so long enough to puff up.

Under the musky light of the stove it was clear he was sick. Concave in places that should be convex, so thin that I couldn’t look for long. Then he started mumbling at either everything or nothing and whatever

Looking up I could see his eyes, my rejection. And when I say up I mean roughly five hundred feet up.

He scrounged through the cupboards for a time, cautious like this was not his house and not his kitchen. It occurred to me that this could well be true.

From his hand two cold cuts of roast beef flapped wet and slimy at the edges. I sidled up, cast him dirty looks. Soon all the meat was gone and I was licking my whiskers and if you squinted hard enough, you might have seen a touch of a smile on his face.

He calls me Fermi, people call him Mulder. Person is more precise, if you’d like—crazy people don’t attract friends, it seems, at least once they turn 55 and move out to the boondocks and put up NO TRESPASSING signs up front.

The one human who dares drive up here is an unassuming one. They always are. She is a she, younger than Mulder, but not by much. Her hands are red and chapped the way doctors’ hands often are. Red hair, noticeable lack of melanin, not in green but she should be.

When she has time, she drives by here. When she doesn’t, she makes time.

My only offense was to be a cat, stalk his goats in the field. A big misunderstanding on his part.

One thing led to another and now we live