Listening to Baker’ voicemail prompts were always like this: spinning in infinity, telling a tale. You could get a glimpse of her, through this medium, that gave you information you could only get in this way. If you saw her grandmother die and then asked Baker if it saddened her, Baker would say nothing. Then you’d listen to her voicemail and in the prompt she would say the truth right there: she was sad. And her girlfriends did the same thing! It was like a totem-pole messenger service for white girls.
Boarding the plane ✈️ high on coke scared me. I had done a lot of coke before taking a cab to the airport and I spent the whole ride there wiping down the corners of my bag, licking clean my normal coke holder and burying it in the bottom of my clothes. LAX is a trip within itself, messages of the white zone and the orange zone (please avoid standing in the—). I passed through the white zone thinking of all the white I had done, hoping those drug-sensing chemicals wouldn’t expose me—all to everyone. I took off my shoes and put my laptop in its own bin and walked through that fucking machine with the facial expression of the Dalai Lama and the shluffing feet of a would-be LA party goer—I would be a party goer except after that first impression I came across like a kid just broke into a candy 🍭 store. I had the nerve but not the money: real LA party people had rich parents and bottomless trusts and multiple parts in small movies.
They were the chosen ones. I was the nothing one.
I got through security. Got through the boarding process. Sat with my carry on beneath my seat, leaned my head against a window, and I’m sure snored all the way through the flight.
During my sleep, I dreamt I was on a bicycle touring a school that was close to the shadow of my plane. There were a hundred black people in a small gymnasium watching a basketball game that was in cable—only—not on regular TV 📺. I ride through that room and back outside, nodding to a guy who is riding his bike and he has crystal meth on him and while my nod means nothing to me, it means that I want some crystal, to him. Soon enough I’m riding my bike, high on crystal, around this park and some people hold a phone out to me:
“This is Whitney Houston. She wants to talk to you.”
I stop my bike and talk on speakerphone.
“Hey Whitney!”
“Hey, my bro. How are you doing over there? Where is over there for you, anyway?”
“Over there? I think I’m in a poor neighborhood, traveling like a flashlight across the country by air, and my shadow casts a spot over poor neighborhoods across the country. Whatever the plane’s shadow touches, I am there. We’re somewhere in the Midwest now. That’s all I know.”
Whitney Houston continued the dream:
“Look there on your TV. There I am—see? Now tell me what to do.”
I looked at the TV in front of these hundred poor kids here to watch the game. It was an old-fashioned one, SONY, with no inputs but for one—the antennae—and skipping past the part where I wondered how they could see anything, I told Whitney Houston to make a heart ♥️ shape with her hands and fingers and as soon as I said that, she did it!
Whitney Houston, right there on TV—right there for me.
I rode out of the gym and saw the meth guy again and I remembered (in the dream) something that seemed at the time to be a remembrance of another meth experience but which also seemed at the time to be a remembrance of another dream, or a remembrance of a dream—just created!—a memory of a memory, the second memory created at the time! to seem like a waking-life memory of another dream—I don’t know how I seem to you but this tangle tripped me solidly upon waking and it was a few minutes more before I took this dream within a dream to consist of another waking-life dream accessed by myself from within this secondary dream. It’s confusing, I know.
Somewhere in there was a stop to change planes. I stooped around this large airport sitting in a circular intersection of hallways, desperately checking that my carry on was still beside me.
I sat down, removed my laptop. It had some of the snail puzzles on it—plus the code to generate them. I tapped this way and tapped thus, there was nowhere else to go with them. I had spent a lifetime (it seemed) in Tucson in front of a white board deducing what originally seemed a system of two states and two rules to what seemed now to be a system of four states with two rules. I could generate, with my new set of pieces, the table of 16 binary Boolean operators just by copying them with my hands, with visual pattern matching (and that’s what made this second rule set superior) but I could not generate the actual snail puzzles from them.
This concerned me as I sat alone in—which airport I can’t remember—working out the pattern matching, the visual copying of four rules which allowed computation to be known as simple creation and unfolding of patterns. They didn’t even have to be visual!—They could be calculated by a blind person—Even a person with no senses could sense this, deep in their brain, I had determined.
That and nervously picking at my coke pill: silver with a keychain and a screw-tight lid. I had carried it with me since I first started doing coke. It came from Amazon. In the airport I unscrewed it and tried tapping its (hopefully non-empty) contents onto my laptop cover. You’ve never lived until you’ve done coke off your MacBook. I was hoping to do some here but the silver pill box had nothing to offer. If you could somehow get your coke over the security points, doing coke in airports would be ideal: it would be a safe environment, no one would imagine you had coke on you and you could tap out lines in clear sight of everyone and they would go: What? Is that what I just saw? and they would say Naw and keep going.
I had a dangerously long layover—one could say a dangerous hangover—during which I could easily have exited the airport and ended up in Nashville, or Atlanta, or whatever city I was in. I could have easily met up with party people in an airport bar and from there gone off on some other adventure, something far more dastardly than the one I was on. Filled up my coke reserves and re-filled my silver pill box.
On the second leg of the flight I wasn’t fortunate enough to have a window seat. I was in the aisle and this meant there were duplicate waitresses-cum-stewardesses rubbing on my super-sensitive sides. Everyone seemed like they were on coke and everyone seemed like they could sell it to me.
I had a panicky moment wherein I doubted my entire goal: sleeping with Baker was doubtable, unlikely: she had gained weight and had a child before our last meeting and I had been telling myself this time would be different: she would have lost weight (at least to her high school level) and the child wouldn’t be with her (that was a London baby that Baker and her boyfriend had given to adoption)—when she had that baby and given her up, Baker had suckered me into listening to her whole sob 😿 story, how they named her Schuyler and they insisted to the adopting couple that they keep her name and the adopting couple said Sure, sure and they obviously were going to change the baby’s name—obviously they were going to change it.
Baker told me that story while I was pinned to the bar stool in a Dayton Thai place. Baker always did that: kept you on the phone too long, long past when anyone would insist the conversation must end! She did it to everyone—I was one of the only people who would still talk to her (listen to her) and so my punishment grew. From a virgin boy who wanted to have sex with her to an experienced man who had sex with her and a lot of people, Baker was always wasting my time. Always making a two-minute conversation into a ten-minute one ⏰. Always driving me crazy with superfluous monologues, over-emphasizing small points which Baker claimed were big ones!
Years after this trip, several moves from city to city for me, Baker found my number on Facebook and called it. I was on my last few minutes of cell time and that wasn’t even a factor when I finally said to her, “Stop. Baker, stop. You always call me and dangle all this bullshit in front of my face, how your kids are doing and how this new man in your life is finally the perfect one..but then there is this unmatched thread 🧵 where you introduce that he’s a wife beater or a drug addict or a crazy Christian. And you never get to it! You’re dragging me on for years with a story that could be told in a minute! Just stop, Baker—please, stop. This is the last time we talk together. I have seen you for the last time. Don’t find me on Facebook. Don’t call this number—in a minute it will change. I love you—in a way. We’re a high school thing. That turned into a fuck buddy thing. I had fun and I truly like you and I will always remember you well. You blew my mind—truly. And I appreciate that Dallas and Caycee have me as their godfather. That was nice of you—more than nice. But I’m not your children’s godfather. I’ll never see them. I’ll never see them, Baker, as few or many years as you and I and they will pass. I will never see you, Baker—never again.”