by Timothy Parfitt
Content warning: Drug use & overdose mentioned
During the last few, drawn-out months of quarantine, Dave developed a new habit. He began perusing social media channels related to methamphetamine. Dave himself had never tried meth himself, probably out of some deep-seated association he made between the drug and poor people. God knows he’d tried just about everything else years ago. Now he was purely a voyeur and there was plenty to see.
Folks, often alone though sometimes in small groups, would turn their camera phones on and film themselves smoking from little glass pipes. “Blowing clouds” was the preferred vernacular. The comments on these videos would be a mix of encouragement and pleas to get sober. If the video depicted a woman, there would be some discourse on her looks. At first, these meth channels became part of Dave’s social media rotation, somewhere he’d go to get stimulated after getting burnt out on a whole day of doom scrolling.
Eventually, he started tuning out virus tracking and geo-politics, even the global warming news. He started with Reddit, but through pages on that site found meth accounts and channels across Instagram and Discord as well. Over time, he became familiar with the most frequent posters, often scantily clad women and socially isolated young men.
Dave even went so far as joining Zoom meetings where everyone besides him was smoking meth or had just smoked meth.
He’d keep his camera off figuring that was the best way to keep a low profile. Quite the opposite. Having his square on the screen blacked out with nothing but devildawg84 to identify him, caused the other folks on the call to grow suspicious.
“Turn your camera on, Devil Dawg!” a woman screamed one night, taking Dave by surprise. He’d left the Zoom on in the background as he prepared dinner.
“What are you, so kind of narc?!” someone else typed into the chat.
“No, just a friendly pothead voyeur 😊” he typed in response.
“GTFO” or some version thereof rained down on him. He left the meeting. After that night, if he joined a call, he’d be sure to turn his camera on right away. Dave ensured the lighting was bad, as if to art-direct himself into the closest version of a meth video possible. He would smoke glass pipes of marijuana and write things like “I luv this community. Luv watching peeps get spun.”
It seemed over the top, but the cheerleading seemed to keep him from getting kicked out. Over the course of an evening of peeping, Dave would cycle through feelings of pity, disgust, revulsion, and occasionally delight, though usually of the laugh-at variety.
Meth makes people social, which is one reason why these sites and meet-ups proliferated. Easier than venturing outside and risking getting arrested. It also made people horny. Dave witnessed dudes touch themselves or women do jittery strip teases. What an adventure it was.
One day after Dave had been peeping for a few months, he noticed a man taking who appeared to be staring back at him. Not a regular, or at least not someone Dave recognized. Though something about the shape of his face was familiar. But under all that dirty hair and waxy skin, it was hard to tell. Before he could place him, the face spoke, cutting someone off mid-rant.
“Dave?” the face asked. Dave’s pulse quickened. He’d never divulged his name in any of the chats, and the email he used to set up his profiles was a dummy account.
“Dave, buddy, is that you?” The face was smiling, and other people in the chat boxes were now taking notice.
“Hey Dave, hey Dave” someone chimed in with a giggle.
“Dave. It’s me, Daniel” the face said. Dave felt his stomach flip. He closed his laptop as fast as he could.
Dave avoided the forums for a good week. He went to his job at a property management company, responding to emails, filing contracts and dispatching handymen to service calls. He did his best to put Daniel out of his mind, which was to say he thought of him constantly.
They’d met at a college in the early 2000s. They were both the kind of artsy rich kid who transitions want the trappings of an artistic life without necessarily making the art. Lots of late nights fueled by coke and needle thin joints arguing Von Trier vs Almodovar.
Daniel could be mischievous and charming. No answer warranted a simple reply. A girl at a party could ask the time and Daniel would brush his brown hair away from eyes and ask why was she in a rush? Ask if he had had dinner already and Daniel may say he wasn’t hungry in turn. Always present was a glint in his eye. It was hard to tell when he was being purposely evasive and when he was doing some version of friend-flirting. Through some miracle both graduated.
After graduation, Dave moved back to Chicago and Daniel moved to New York City. For a while Dave would receive postcards from Daniel every few months. Artsy, ink smeared things that usually featured a blurry self-portrait on one side and Daniel’s illegible scrawl on the other. Dispatches from the fast life in New York City, following in the footsteps of scuzzo, rich kid druggie types like Dash Snow. It seemed glamorous from afar, though the appeal of being a glorious mess was waning for Dave.
The last time he visited Daniel, his friend had gotten him very stoned and then bullied him into driving his boxy white hand-me-down Mercedes clear across town. See Daniel’s license had been suspended due to some misunderstanding, and they simply had to make the 8:00 showing of Suspira at the Film Forum. Dave managed to get them and the car there in one piece but was sick with anxiety the whole way there. He spent the rest of the trip wondering if his friend couldn’t detect his discomfort, or simply didn’t care. Or even worse, enjoyed it.
Six months later Daniel was dead. Dave received a call from a number he didn’t realize. It turned out to be a mutual friend from college.
“I got your number from Daniel’s phone,” this friend Teddy said. “We’ve been going through his things.”
Fentanyl-laced coke was to blame. When his parents hadn’t heard from him in a week, they used their spare key to let themselves into his loft and found him face down, seated at his dining room table. After a night of bar hopping, Daniel had scored some coke on his way home, done a few bumps and that was that. Dave should not have been that surprised, given Daniel’s nose for trouble and penchant for keeping the night going. But he’d always had an aura of invincibility around him. Lots of kids act invincible, but they usually hit the ground eventually. Daniel, through some combination of swagger, privilege and luck, never seemed to walk away with as much as a scratch.
This sense that Daniel couldn’t really be gone was compounded by the fact that Dave skipped the funeral. He told his friends he couldn’t afford it, though that wasn’t entirely the case. It was more that he couldn’t face the whole ordeal. It took a while, but over the course of the next three years Dave was able to slowly come to terms with his friend being dead. Daniel had used up all his nine lives.
Some of the memorial sites and obituaries had been taken down, but Dave found a good number of them still up. He re-read the flowery dedications, all the exaltations of Daniel’s potential and his unique and profound effect on this earth. Dave didn’t disagree exactly, but it did seem like a rosy spin on someone he considered a fundamentally dark dude. One thing was clear, though. Everyone seemed to agree Daniel was dead.
Dave kicked himself for not taking a screenshot of this person claiming to be his friend. The likeness was close, but between the lighting and the connection pixelating the feed, a few seconds was not nearly enough time to be sure. It had to be some sort of hoax. The alternative was ludicrous, the type of thing that only happens in dime store thrillers. His friend would be the kind of person to see the value in faking his own death, but did he have the discipline to go through with it? Had his parents ever really found his body, as everyone claimed? And if that had all been a ruse, why would he go through all that work just to expose himself to Dave in some meth-addled corner of the internet?
After a week, Dave cautiously ventured back into a few of the forums. He half-expected his own image to be plastered all over the place, exposing him as what…an interloper? Instead, it appeared to be business as usual. Threads full of advice for getting high or conversely getting sober. Lonely, intoxicated people being social via technology. No sign of “Daniel.” Dave felt a great sense of relief tinged with a bit of disappointment. For a few moments, he wondered if he had someone dreamt the whole incident. Or perhaps it had been an entirely different Daniel reaching out to a different Dave. After all, there were a dozen people logged into that conversation.
Then came the email.
It came from a Gmail account that appeared to be a long string of random letters and numbers. The subject line was “…so we meet again” and the body of the message read:
Thought u were 2 good for meth lol. Guess not? Or just here for the lookie-loo.
Either way, good to see u bro. I’m gonna be in Chicago soon…maybe real soon.
Ur pal daniel
Dave read the email at work, sitting alone in the small office on the second floor above a store that sold Quinceanera dresses on Montrose avenue. His palms were sweating, and he felt the heat rise in his head, like he was fighting off a fever. Responding to the email was out of the question. He deleted it and closed his work laptop.
He locked the office and took a walk around the block. Leaving the office unattended was frowned upon, but he worried if he stayed in that dusty space he’d retch. Walking up and down the block did eventually help him calm down. He bought a discount submarine sandwich from the chain place on the block, more for cover in case someone pressed him about his absence than out of real hunger and made his way back.
No one waiting for him, no missed calls on the company landline, no new emails besides a few spam promotions. Dave deleted the email from “Daniel” and reconfigured the settings of his work laptop and personal phone so the meth forums and pages were all blocked. He thought about texting one of their mutual friends, Teddy perhaps. He could do a little bit of fishing, mask it with nostalgia or some warm remembrance of fun times with Daniel. After typing something out, he deleted the message. It pained him to even type out a disguised version of “Daniel’s really dead, right? You didn’t help him concoct an elaborate ruse?”
The phone next to him rang, shaking him out of his reverie. It was Richard, the general manager of the company.
“Dave, normally I’d have Raul handle something like this, but he’s out sick and I need this taken care of right away. Some pieces of shit in 4428 Damen moved out in the middle of night and left the place trashed. Brenda said it looked like they were cooking drugs in there. We have some kind of deposit from them, right?”
“We do.” The company never let anyone move in without a deposit.
“That’s good at least. Listen, could you go over and start cleaning the place up? Bring a mask, some gloves and a whole bunch of garbage bags. Raul can deep-clean once he gets back, but I don’t want someone seeing any junkie shit laying around in the meantime and getting the city involved. We’ll never get that unit rented again in our lifetime if that happens. If you can’t find the gloves and stuff in the office, get them at Walgreens. Save a receipt and we’ll reimburse you.”
The apartment smelled like burnt plastic and damp paper towels. Dave had found a respirator mask Raul used while painting and bought the other things at the store on the way over. It took all his willpower not to succumb into full on superstition and think that this was some cosmic sign.
His heart pounded as he opened the unlocked front door to the unit, half expecting to see Daniel standing amidst the rubble, waiting for him. It was a one-bedroom unit, with a bathroom on your left as you enter, a living room with a small bedroom to the right and at the far end the kitchen.
Dave was surprised to find that besides the kitchen, the apartment was relatively clean. A few dust bunnies and empty chip bags, but no clothes or furniture, certainly not the piles of random belongings and month-old takeout they found sometimes.
The kitchen itself was another story. A two-foot-wide black burn mark stretched from under the sink, up the wall and to the ceiling. An uncut watermelon sat on the counter along with a dozen 2L soda bottles with liquids of various colors in them. Broken glass littered the floor. He spotted a few charred glass pipes and at least one bottle for feeding a baby formula. After opening the back door to let the place air out a bit, he donned his dishwashing gloves, shook open a garbage bag and started cleaning up.
Around when he’d filled up a third bag, it started raining outside. A drizzle at first, and then it progressed to the point that water was coming in the open windows. Dave went through and closed them, only to see a solitary figure in the courtyard. It was a man from his build, with his hoodie up against the rain. It was hard to see his face, but Dave could make out a scraggly beard on the man. Strange to be standing there getting wet, if he was waiting for someone, he could at least get cover in one of the doorways. Already on edge, Dave fought a feeling of wanting to place the man. He could barely see what he looked like, how could he recognize him?
It’s Daniel, a voice deep inside his belly said. The voice that enraged Dave, since he’d spent the whole day fighting such paranoia. He reopened the window and took his mask off.
“Hey! Hey! Yeah you, do you live in this building?” Dave had to strain his voice to be heard over the rain.
The man looked up at him but didn’t say anything. Was that a smirk Dave saw? He was now convinced that it was Daniel. Of course, it wasn’t Daniel. Someone was pulling an elaborate prank on him and he was getting tired of it.
He threw open the door to the apartment and started down the stairs to the courtyard. When he got outside he could hear the traffic on Damen. With the rain, the honks sounded far off and dreamy. The man was still there, standing in the exact spot, apparently not looking at anything in particular. Dave had never started a fight in his life, but he walked up to this man ready to hurt him. All this teasing about his dead friend. What kind of sick pervert would do such a thing?
“Do you live here? This is private property. If you don’t live here and you’re not visiting a tenant, you need to leave.”
Up close Dave saw how soaked the man was. The ratty, dark tracksuit pants and black hoodie he wore appeared completely saturated. The man’s face was pitted with scars and when he smiled, his teeth were yellow and fuzzy-looking. Dave was sure that if it came to a fight he could take him, up close he could see how emaciated the guy was.
“I’m talking to you! If you don’t have legitimate business here, you need to get off the property pal.”
Dave was so jittery with adrenaline he hoped the guy would give him an excuse to start throwing punches. Instead, he kept smiling his creepy stoned smile. “It’s me, Dave,” the man said finally. “I’ve come back.”
Timothy Parfitt is an essayist and critic based in Chicago. His work has been featured in Contrary, X-R-A-Y, Newcity, Punctuate, Ligeia, Moon City Press and Thread.
Dylan Willoughby is a street photographer, especially drawn to street art, murals, graffiti, most of which do not last for long before being blasted away or painted over. Though he had passed by this particular alleyway in downtown Long Beach many times, something urged me to peek my head in. “I saw this fascinating piece depicting numerous articulated bipedal gorilla skeletons piling on top of each other, forming a mountain of bones. I’m reminded of the tradition of “vanitas” paintings from the baroque, where we see skulls that teach us that life is all too transient and we must face our mortality, often in the context of the very beautiful and ornate.”
