[May Be Habit Forming]

The codeine bottle sat righteously, two-thirds empty, in the top left corner of the medicine cabinet right between the Vaseline (Lucy could never remember buying Vaseline, but somehow it was always present) and the natural Irish hangover remedy which hadn’t been used in some time, actually. She wondered if it was still fresh. Like all good dizzying medications, the codeine cough syrup, prescribed for that terrible of terrible flu that Lucy had contracted about 2 weeks after her father passed away, was one of the tiny, thankful distractions she had at that time. Also there was Jack in her bed throughout it all, there was the new job she was starting at the end of the month (or rather the old job that had laid her off years back, during the time when she had planned to run away to the shores of Los Angeles, making it out by the time she hit 30…well, almost. She didn’t go), there were the meals Lucy got from her mother, made with even more care and more leftovers than she knew what to do with, there was whiskey – beautiful, sap stained Irish whiskey, there was the upcoming move into the waterfront section of Brooklyn, into which she slid like the others who lived there – running away from something, being through with something, starting over, being yourself and not pretending anymore. There was all that, which she was about to face, conquer and swim laps around like a harpy with no shoes on, dirt happily itching at her feet. There would be love, and loss of it, more than once, but all that hadn’t happened yet.

Lucy had been prescribed the codeine by the doctor, and she took it. Thick purple stuff it was. It made her remember how she hated taking cough syrup or any sort of medicine when she was little. There would be hours-long negotiations with her mother about it. She hated the taste of it so much and built it up so much in her head that sure enough, when the spoon would go into her mouth (her mother thought by shoveling it in quickly, her daughter would taste it less), Lucy’d gag and spit most, if not all of it, up. It was just no good. Once, out of frustration, her mother dragged her down a very short stack of thickly carpeted stairs (by the hair, Lucy was told, by her brother who enjoyed making their mother feel guilty about every little thing “wrong” she did…..truly, her mother did very few things wrong) instructing her brother: “hold her down, John!” when Lucy had an ear infection and needed desperately to take the medication. When Lucy’s father got home from working that night (he set his own hours and performed his own magic feats with electricity every chance he could with his own electrical business – they were magic feats because he saw them as such, loved what he did and did not answer to anybody), he told her mother (in somewhat constant but well spoken broken English) “you never do that to her again”. That night, Lucy was taking her ear infection medication smothered in chocolate ice cream.

And it went like that. But after Lucy’s father was (just) gone, she happily took this purple codeine magical elixir (it was so, because she saw it as such, much like her father) and it indeed quelled her terrible hacking cough and thereby soothed her raw throat, which she had been coating with soup and hot whiskey. During the course of the codeine weekend, she remembered Jack taking her mother’s stew and adding, as he usually did, a blanket of cheese on top, throwing in a few of her spices and serving it to Lucy by her sofa side. Of course, they had been fucking regardless of her being sick throughout, and only in the last day, when the constant cough and the raw throat made her moan from its pain, she just hadn’t the energy. He still would sit there with her, her head in his lap, dress with no underwear, while he ran circles around the top of her ass, and they watched something sweet like “The Shining”. Lucy’s breathing would increase slowly and she could feel him there, and slowly her hands would move up or down and in a start they’d be kissing and it would all just start over again. Hard to stop at that, really, when your body wants what it wants. He somehow never got sick from her either.

On that particular night, Lucy was asleep -napping- while Jack spoke on the phone and watched Dario Argento films which made her drug induced sleep full of accented and dubbed screams, breathy Italian voices and eerie background music. In addition, she started to hallucinate a bit, part way into her nap- turning back and forth, seeing the half eaten stew sitting there, not remembering having eaten it, and then thinking someone else she knew had shown up- but it was all in the twilight, not in the actual environment, so-called. Codeine came from opiates, so it indeed had a lot to offer, if you weren’t interested in straight lines anymore, and wanted to let some other part of you (i.e. the universal mind) run the show for awhile while your body slept, your thighs still sore from that afternoon.

All of this ran through Lucy’s mind in the seconds during which she opened the medicine cabinet in her waterfront apartment two years later. The bottle of codeine cough syrup had just about expired, but she couldn’t bring herself to get rid of it. Purple streaks decked the sides of it, along with a faint but substantially hardened ring around its bottom, which Lucy felt give her a bit of a fight (she liked a bit of a fight) when she tried to remove it from the shelf in order to spy more closely its one-third remaining contents. A woman named Amanda had come over that evening to see Liz, the woman who shared Lucy’s kitchen within the two apartments which made up the third floor. Liz would be leaving the States for good soon – moving to Portugal where she had been traveling to regularly for the last 2 years oddly (Lucy found the number odd anyway) and where she’d be opening her own shop and art gallery. Liz had family money, which always left a chip taken from Lucy’s shoulder and placed delicately inside her mouth, when it came to people with family money. Amanda had befriended Liz in the months she lived there, and had befriended Lucy as well. People like Amanda were always drawn to people like Lucy; fractured, openly wounded and flailing people, who sought her rootedness and tenderness and strength sometimes with a force she could not say no to.

This night was not a happy visit though. While Lucy and Liz shared a meal, and some wine, Amanda blew in (expectantly) crying her eyes out, as her twin brother- the one she felt beyond the usually spoken about tenets, irreparably joined with since, well, always- he had finally done it. He had been waking up in a haze most nights, taking massive amounts of pain pills for no such physical ailment. He was a depressive, like his sister, and an addict generally speaking, as she was. Drink, pills, most anything. He had a young wife, and two little kids, one just a baby. Amanda had come over many times before- worried about him, terribly worried so that her stomach would be aching, and she’d get drunk fast as she could- to stop the worrying, to help her sleep, which she could not. Amanda would say that she could Feel that her twin would kill himself in this way soon. And he did. He did so at the age of 32, same age as her, a few moments younger and gone in a flash into his addict’s heaven. Or so she hoped. Amanda was hysterical on this night, and was in some kind of kaleidoscope of grief, shock and pain. She felt like she was dying, physically and more. Like her life’s vitality was cut from her. But she could not bleed, or see it so. Amanda soon calmed down, ate some food, drank all of Liz’s wine, and they talked about it, and then did not, as Amanda’s inner addict took hold for survival’s sake and found out that Lucy had in her medicine cabinet the aforementioned one-third of the thickened bottle of codeine cough syrup. Half drunk herself, Lucy had gone to retrieve it for Amanda, when all the memories of its origin, of the origin of Lucy’s relationship with medications, with her own brother, and father and family took place.

Quick as all that, Lucy was back in the other apartment with the bottle, which Amanda sipped big gulps from, growing more manic with each one, each chaser of white wine, and each overstepping fashion of words which slipped right out of her mouth as if in a stream. Like she orgasmed every few sentences at once, multiplying while her body similarly moved and shook slightly. This got them talking about orgasms (segues never really are such…they are just empty excuses for talking about what you want to talk about). The passage of words which led to this doesn’t matter; that we are here now is all you need see. It got to the specific point that neither of these very adventurous women (so named by their own opinions) had ever ejaculated when having an orgasm, whether by someone else or by their own very capable hand. Lucy sipped her wine, keeping it closer to her face, and sighed. The wine glass, now empty, made a very thoughtful 'cklllink' as she replaced it on the grey stone counter top. Lucy made the face of a child, sly right sided smile and silently lifted up her fingers as if she was asking for permission to go to the little girls’ room in elementary school. Amanda and Liz both started reacting in many forms at once – wide eyes, laughter, bright exclamations, almost as if this was being communicated to a very titillated man, getting up from the couch and/or making their way over to Lucy to question or clarify this fact she had expressed without words. They asked her if she had, indeed, “had them”. And Lucy told them that she has Only had them that way for a very long time. That the men she’d been with hadn’t always made her come, but when she did, and always when she did by Her own very capable hands, she came completely. That’s right. She had an active, liquid cunt. They asked her, how much? Lucy told them that, when properly, it was gushing. It was messy, indeed. Whether alone or not, she always tended to have to have a towel over sheets, or some such barrier to catch the wave as it were.

They leaned in and listened further, Amanda now completely distracted from her twin brother’s death as she put down the last remaining drops of the codeine elixir to listen even more fascinated than before. Lucy started to feel self conscious, but they both assured her – it was an amazing feat, and she was special. Drunken, and codeine intoxicated Amanda even remarked that Lucy was like a unicorn! Lucy further explained that it wasn’t always this way. She couldn’t remember the first time it happened (alone probably) many years ago….how for awhile she wasn’t sure if it was what it was, but she read up on it and kept a close eye out, and knew it came from a different spring than the other place. She had not wet the bed, in the traditional sense. Nowadays, she said, when occasionally it didn’t happen like that, if she was too drunk, or tired or not bringing her full heart to it, she felt like it wasn’t real, like it didn’t reach her, like it didn’t count. There Was something to it; she didn’t just have this extra feature. When it came like that, most often, she could feel it building and always knew when it would show itself, but couldn’t usually feel from whence it came. Maybe it Was like a unicorn, mysterious and free and from the mystical waters where light is dark and dream is drug induced reality…..a friend of hers (a bonafide red headed slut who was now mother to a beautiful red headed baby daughter) had engaged Lucy about it, and told her that it was the only way to be, and that you could control its trajectory, force and mark if you worked at it. Usually though, in the seconds at which it would happen, Lucy was so immensely uncontrolled in her body and her self that it was more like a virgin oil well coming for the very first time, covering the earth and letting you know just how utterly alive it was in that moment- creating and in creation, and fostering a warning to anything that surrounded her that when she was made to bring it on all the way, carrying the gods and the pains and the liberated stars with her, you just couldn’t be afraid of getting a little wet when calling up the depths of the ocean like that.

Liz indeed went off to Portugal, with Amanda leaving New York soon after her twin brother’s funeral, travelling to Costa Rica, then back to Alabama where she was from, marrying her brother’s best friend, getting pregnant (or probably the other way around), getting divorced (or probably annulled) and travelling again to Costa Rica to lose herself any way she could. Amanda’s back in Alabama now, making floral bouquets with her very own business. Lucy is still in the waterfront, having had no need for codeine for some time, so the bottle was not replaced in the medicine cabinet. She still talks to Amanda sometimes, checking in on her when anniversaries of grief come and go, chiming in with her own thoughts about her father, and about how many Eastern cultures take part in ancestral worship – wherein families look to their non-living relatives who have gone before as gods to be sat at the base of, and talked to and asked for advice. That the ancestors spoke through us all the time. After these searing, comforting thoughts would pass between their occasional communications, Amanda would always offer Lucy a coy and hearty closing salutation, referring to her with a wink as “my lovely unicorn”.

M. Lucia