Episode One. Capital-R Rough draft.
I was rolling with a crew of principled psychopaths and I think that I might've been in over my head. We called ourselves the Gang of Three, even though there were four of us, because the name was already in place when they found me. Each of us had had to prove ourselves by accomplishing some extraordinary task. Mine was the easiest and most ordinary: heroin addiction. The most ordered heroin addiction you'd ever seen.
I locked myself in a room with a bunch of old books and jazz records. I had a bucket for piss, a bucket for shit, and a bucket of fresh water brought up daily. Three times a day, one of The Three would come in and shoot me up in incremantally larger doses. I don't know where they got the junk, I never saw the dealer myself. I just stayed in my room, nodding off into the floorboards as the needle bounced along a Dizzy Gillespie track.
My problem was that I was neurotic. I needed to be in control at all times. My addiction and my participation in the Gang of Three broke me of that. For the most part, I'm in control but my body betrays that control. I'll get lost in my head on my way home, and my legs will start walking off into some sketchy neighborhood hopin to find someone to hook me up. I'll be surprised to hear myself lying to a doctor, trying to score vicodin, as if I didn't know what will happen to me, what kind of a spell I'll get caught in after just one becomes just a couple, becomes... It's invigorating to know that there's a certain part of myself I can't logic into submission.
I met the rest of the Gang of Three during the my first week in Law School. They were already well on their way to becoming what we are today, but they were still experimenting with their personal evolutions, and only occasionally taking on cases. It was all pro bono back then, they hadn't become a firm yet. Anyway, it was the first week of orientation and there were lectures being held all over school. I was in a stall in the men's room when I saw their flier.
Change the world theough legal action. Bring about classless utopian democracy. Save the world from people like yourself. Save yourself from people like the world.
Damen Hall. Thursday the 12th. 5:00 PM.
I was the only one who showed up, so we went to a bar. They were all there. Claire, back when she had long hair; Damien, looking tall and powerful; and spastic Devon, with his eyes darting around the room. Their trials were much more physical than mine, although the physical aspects were far easier to overcome than the mental.
At five years, Claire who would become my lover, was only halfway through hers. Over the course of a decade, she got pregnant nine times and had nine abortions. She wanted to understand the feeling at each stage of pregnancy, so she terminated the first pregnancy at one month, the second at two months, the third at three months, and so on. Each time she named them. Each time she went to the doctors, frequently, to check on their progress. The seventh and eighth were mine. Julien and Sean (Shawn before we found out she was a girl). With both of mine, I tried to persuade her to keep them, and she thought about it. The first time, she slept on it for a night, the second time for a week, before waking up and slapping me and calling me a temptor. Each time she cried.
Devon was her brother. His goal was to de-sex himself. He spent years taking different hormones, trying to neutralize all his sexual acids and bases. He decides when he meets someone whether he's going to be a man or a woman for them, and then sticks with it. When I met him, he was a man, which is why I use the pronoun. He says that he makes the decision within the first minute of conversation. I hear that subconsciously, that minute is when we all decide whether we want to fuck that person we've just met. Devon doesn't fuck. He's a eunuch. I showered with him once, on a trip, and I imagined he would be smooth down there like a Ken doll but he's anything but. Just a mess of scar tissue and one ugly, unfuckable piss hole. He takes whatever he can to deaden the desire, short of pharmaceuticals. Prozac would probably beat homeopathy but he won't do Pfizer. He doesn't twitch anymore, or look over his shoulder. I can honestly say that I've never met a happier miserable person in all my life.
Damien doesn't want to be a person at all, and his task won't be done with until he's dead. He's like a superhero trying to undo himself, trying to get rid of all that makes him human. Not in terms of personality or conviction or a soul, but in actual parts. He started slowly, by shaving off all of his hair. Then he donated a kidney. He cut off the ring finger and gave it to a prostitute, as an homage to Van Gogh, and they got married the next year. Eventually he'd had both his legs amputated and a partial lobotomy. He's kept his genitals out of respect for Devon's task. We've denied him the right to lose his arms, and forced him to let his eyebrows grow in, just so that he could remain a public figure. Just so that he can remain useful. If it were up to him he would just be a voicebox, but we need him. His voice, which comes out in his stern glare and the gestures of his strong arms, and his frail frame juxtapose to make him that much stronger. When I say force and I say deny, what I mean is that we make all decisions by committee. The Gang of Three has power of attorney over all its members. It controls our bank accounts and whether or not we can leave the country. Eventually, it will decide whether we live or die, until there's just one of us, left with the burden of his or her own self to take care of.
And that's it. The little guy's best friend. The man's worst enemy. The scariest and most beautiful thing I've ever seen. The Gang of Three.
