The Death of St. Jimmy

“Calm the fuck down!” Jimmy laughed as tied him off, giving him a steady look. Jimmy’s eyes were pale, pretty creepy.

“I can’t help my fuckin’ heartbeat, asshole,” he quipped in reply.

Jimmy was surgical. Almost like a doctor, not that D. had anyone to compare him to. He hadn’t seen one in years. When he was a kid, he was afraid of needles. Blood tests, shots, hell, anything, he would burst into tears and beg and plead for his mother to take him away. He didn’t tell Jimmy any of this. Jimmy was tough.

The music was so loud he could feel his heart thumping with the bass. He liked Jimmy’s place. Had actually fallen in love with it the second he laid eyes on it. It was the kind of place he had always wanted. It was tiny, for one thing: one big room, a miniature kitchen that was totally trashed, a bathroom. The walls were white, but only underneath all the grime and Sharpie-scrawled messages and duct tape to cover the holes in the plaster. Two old couches with pillows worn thin after years of abuse were pushed up against the wall. Jimmy’s stereo was scratched and old, but it worked and it was loud as hell, and that was what mattered. A low table in another corner was littered and sticky with empty bottles of booze, multicolored pills, pot, even a little bit of coke; that would belong to whatsername – Erica - he thought, that girl couldn’t die.

He was distracted; when the needle finally pierced his skin, he barely felt it.

“Today you become a man, big boy,” Jimmy was saying with a smirk. D. could barely make it out, it was so loud in there, he was as much reading Jimmy’s mouth as he was hearing the words.

Jimmy pushed down on the plunger without any further warning, and it was done. Much easier than he had thought it would be. Much easier than they used to tell him at school, when policemen would come to school and scare the hell out of him with their propaganda. Fuck that. He could already feel the drug coiling in his veins; it was probably his imagination, but maybe not. He hadn’t really asked Jimmy what to expect; well, he had, but Jimmy had laughed - that was Jimmy for you - and said, “Try it and see.” So he did.

It felt good. He felt like he could do anything and it would feel good. He was watching Erica. She was stretched out on the floor; her shirt had ridden up her stomach, and he could see the tattoos peeking out of her jeans, the silver ring in her navel. He’d watched her do that herself - it had bled like hell but she hadn’t cried. She’d been fucked up at the time. She was always fucked up. Some guy he didn’t know had one hand on her knee and the other inching up her shirt, but she was staring at the water stains on the ceiling and didn’t notice. Strangers always turned up at Jimmy’s. Sometimes they needed to have their asses kicked, but usually they were just kids looking for a good time. Normally, that guy with his hands on this girl would have really bugged him, but he couldn’t be bothered.

He got up and stepped over people sitting on the floor, making his way towards the kitchen. He could hear people fucking in the bathroom, the walls were paper-thin and they were being deliberately loud, but it just made him smile. All he could find in Jimmy’s kitchen was some instant Ramen. That son of a bitch, it was all he ever ate. He took it anyway.

When he sat back down, holding his steaming bowl of cardboard-flavoured noodles, Jimmy had a cigarette going in the ashtray and was tying himself off. D. sat down and started to work on the Ramen, watching Jimmy shoot up. Pretty soon, Jimmy had a glazed look that he figured he probably had as well.

“How’s it feeling?” Jimmy asked, his voice slow.

“Pretty fuckin’ good,” he answered, spilling noodles onto his already filthy black jeans.

“Well, you’re welcome, little man.”

“You’re my fuckin’ best friend,” D. said, thickly.

But Jimmy wasn’t paying attention to him anymore, his eyes were closed. Some kid yelled, “Your CD is stuck!” and someone else yelled, “Shut the fuck up!” in reply. The kid who had been touching Erica was gone, now she was in the corner, cutting up a line of coke with someone’s bus pass. He watched her for a while. She looked cute, hunched over the table like that.

After a while she came to sit in his lap. He wondered if she was a slut. He didn’t know. Didn’t care. She was new to the crowd, almost as new as him, and nobody knew anything about her, except that she was cute and knew the dealers in town before she even got there. She was smart, too, and Jimmy said she was probably a lot younger than she acted.

“Hey, D.?” she said, voice soft.

“Yeah?”

“Let’s go somewhere.” She wasn’t subtle, this girl. He sort of liked that.

“I think I love you.”

He was surprised to hear himself say it. Was it true? Probably not. All he really knew was that he hated it when that guy had his hands on her, he loved the way she talked and acted and that was enough.

The bathroom door was wide open now, the people who had been in there before had left and hadn’t broken anything, which was good; Jimmy hated having to repair things in the morning, he liked throwing things out when they broke, and when he couldn’t, he was pissed off, which was not a good thing when he was also hung-over.

So D. took Erica’s hand and led her to the bathroom.

On the way, he shot a backward glance at Jimmy, whose wide, glassy eyes stared back at him. He raised his eyebrows, feeling smug. Jimmy gave him a wink and smirked as he pulled the bathroom door shut.

Four months later, Jimmy was dead, and whatsername – Erica - had whirled out of town without him, in a hurricane of empty words, with her vague, taunting expression, the same way she had come in.

Jimmy shot himself in the head, on a bridge at twilight. His body was drenched in blood. His face was unrecognizable. But it was him. The scrawny body, the thin clothes, it was him. It was too fucking poetic for a guy like Jimmy, but it was probably how he had wanted to go. As though he wasn’t just a good-for-nothing punk, which he was, really, but in the best way. D. could still hear him saying, “I fuckin’ love you, and don’t take that the wrong way, you queer.” That was Saint-fucking-Jimmy for you.

He was confused.

He never saw it was coming, and Jimmy hadn’t said anything. He felt strangely hollow, wondered if maybe he was supposed to care a little more than he did. He didn’t need Jimmy to administer his heroin anymore. And life went on. He was going to leave town with Erica, but then she left without him. He wasn’t too broken up about that either. She left him some money.

He went back to Jimmy’s apartment for the last time, took as many of Jimmy’s drugs as he dared, and then hopped on the next bus home. This one’s for you, Jimmy, he thought. I’ll become a fuckin’ good member of society for you, so you have something to laugh about from beyond the grave. Or wherever.

Here’s to you, you son of a bitch.