bio

David "Starchy" Grant lives in San Francisco, where he collects alter-egos, causes trouble, confuses the populace, and toils without reward as both a means and an end. He is widely considered to be one of District 5's foremost musical saw players. Please, just call him Starchy.

primary external link:
starchy @ livejournal

Sharing a Needle

I ran into Armando last Saturday on my way home from the record store. We sat down to have a cup of coffee together and chat for a few minutes. He told me that he'd stopped doing acid or E, and that he'd cut back on speed, even though he was still selling the stuff.

"I've got something better going on now," he told me. He had lost some weight, but otherwise he looked pretty healthy, so I wasn't sure whether to suspect him of doing smack or finding religion. He didn't want to talk about it then, but before heading off to make a sale he invited me to stop by his place the next evening. I guess I let curiosity get the better of me in the end.

When he opened his front door on Sunday night, he had a lit cigarette in his mouth, and I could barely see the other end of his living room through all the smoke in the air. "Shit, Armando, you ever open the windows in here?"

"What? No. Why?" He offered me a line before I could answer.

"You know I don't do that crap anymore."

"Sorry," he said, dropping ash on the carpet. "Forgot."

"So what's this new shit you've gotten into? Do I even want to know?" I slapped him lightly on the shoulder and lit a cigarette of my own.

"Oh, yeah, man, you do. Meet Roxanne." He pointed to a small glass tank set on a table against one wall. I walked over to it, and there, chilling out in the middle of some artificial desert scenery, was a six-inch long black scorpion.

"You got a pet."

"No, man, she's not just a pet. Roxanne and me got a real special relationship," he said as he walked over to join me by the tank.

"Let me guess: You feed her, she stings you. A match made in heaven."

"Yeah, man." He giggled. "That's exactly it."

"They take out the poison gland before they sell these things, don't they?" I asked, looking around for an ashtray.

"Yeah, if you buy them at a pet store, but that's not how I found Roxanne."

"Wait, you mean--"

"Yeah."

I found myself backing away from the tank, almost involuntarily.

"Is that safe?"

"One sting won't kill nobody. I mean, yeah, it hurts real fucking bad for a while, but then the pain stops and you're just floating. It's like your body goes away, and everything's real beautiful, man."

"Sounds like death," I said.

"Maybe. I don't know," he said as he opened a trap door on the top of the tank. "I guess there are some people in India who have been doing this for thousands of years or something."

"India's a weird fucking place."

Armando started poking at Roxanne. The actual sting was too fast for me to see, but all of a sudden she was in a different position and his arm was shooting back up out of the tank. It looked like he'd received a nasty electrical shock.

"Fuck!" He screamed, pacing madly and clutching the wrist of his wounded hand with the healthy one. "Oh, shit, shit, shit, shit!"

"Jesus Christ! Are you okay?"

"Shit! Shit! Shit!"

After a few minutes he sat down on the edge of his couch, breathing heavily and still clutching his wrist. His eyes were staring straight ahead, unfocused. "You gonna be okay?" I asked him again.

"Yeah," he whispered.

"Is it always like this?"

"Yeah, man. Just like this."

"Your neighbors must love you." I walked back over to the tank and leaned in, my face almost up against the glass.

If you've never had a close look at a live scorpion, it's a hell of a sight. They almost look more like a piece of pseudo-organic machinery than like an animal of any sort, like the very embodiment of efficiency. Maybe it's nature's way of saying, "You think you humans have that whole engineering thing down? Yeah, right. Look at this! Not one molecule out of place!"

"What's the story, Roxanne? Are you just misunderstood? Are you really the assassin of the animal world, or are you the pusher?" My interrogation fogged the glass between us. She didn't move.

Armando let out a soft, low moan as he sank back into the couch, eyes half-closed and mouth half-open. It sounded like a very subdued orgasm.

"This is crazy," I said to myself before burying my cigarette in some ancient Chinese take-out. Trembling, I stuck my hand into the tank.

For the longest five minutes of my life, the universe was taken up by nothing but one infinitesimal spot on the back of my hand. When the pain finally started to fade, seeming to take everything else with it, I was vaguely aware of Armando's voice hissing out through his teeth in a strained, groaning whisper: "Twenty bucks." I fell forward onto my knees, not even feeling it as I hit the floor.

"That's twenty bucks, man."