The Memory Detective

You’re waking up in your car in a Target parking lot on a Sunday. How did you arrive here? It is morning but the time is unavailable since you don’t wear a watch, your phone is dead, and you cannot find your keys to turn the car on to check the digital clock on the dash. 

In the car there are a few items that can help piece together the previous day. A bottle of cheap Cupcake brand red wine, three-fourths empty, lays on the floor of the passenger seat. Its sour smell is permeating your gray Honda Civic hatchback, which has become a greenhouse of regret as the heat of the summer sun bakes the car with the windows rolled up. Nothing grows in this Honda greenhouse but anxiety. Without keys you cannot push the button to force the windows down and allow some fresh air in, as fresh as air can be in Atlanta in the summer. The previous car had windows with an actual crank that didn’t need power. This Sunday would have benefited from such lack of technology. You miss that type of window rolling device. You miss the days of simple machines.

Beck’s CD, Morning Phase, is laying on the passenger seat. The irony of the CD title does not hit you for years. You don’t have a CD player at home but you hate purchased the CD because when Beck won the Grammy Kayne protested it. You already owned it on vinyl which came with a free digital download. The impulse to purchase it again on another medium is indicative to how you live you life. 

The glare of the Georgia sun is bouncing off the CD and into your face. It is both a comfort and annoyance. The heat of the beam feels good on your face, but since you wear glasses the sunlight is penetrating your socket and blazing your brain afire of pain and regret, but you aren’t sure what you regret yet. You wonder if the CD is ruined from the sun beams that have been trying to burn it, with increased strength from your greenhouse car windows now yellowed from too many cigarettes. 

There is a bag of Taco Bell thrown in the backseat. You pick up the 32oz cup from the holder next to the stick shift and take a sip. It’s gross. Warm and watered down Diet Pepsi. You think to yourself, Pepsi is number two in the cola wars and only losers drink number two colas. This is Atlanta and no one drinks Pepsi in the land of Coca Cola. It is fitting that you live in the birthplace of Coca Cola and are addicted to cocaine, a drink that once had cocaine in its recipe.

You wished the drink was a McDonald’s ice cold Diet Coke. It’s not. You must have been desperate to not only accept a number two cola, but also soy filler tacos from the Bell. But since you feel like a fucking loser, it seems fitting to have Diet Pepsi warm and watered down in your mouth. You can’t find the keys to your car and are desperate for some air, so you open the door and half spit out the warm and watered down Diet Pepsi and half throw up. The throw up is a reddish brown, letting you know that you drank that Cupcake red wine not that long ago. 

You cannot remember what you did last night because you are addicted to many things and the top of that list is the addiction to forgetting. While it would be easy to blame the Ambien, it is far more complex than a pill. You take the Ambien because it is a mind eraser. You have the strongest of desire to erase this time of your life. To erase all times that are unpleasant. You are addicted to forgetting. Why you drink and inhale cocaine is a symptom of something greater than you can admit or excavate from the recesses of your mind. Worse is the pills as they allow you to forget the impulsive behavior. 

The most curious item in the car, beyond the sad Diet Pepsi, is an unlabeled VHS tape. You don’t own a VCR. There is no record of it on the Target receipts crumpled on the floor of the car. Target does not even sell VHS tapes. It’s ridiculous you looked. What you do know is this VHS tape may or may not contain you on it and you may or may not be naked engaging in sex. The thought of this causes your heart to race, but that could be a side effect of a weekend of cocaine. However, you limitedly eliminate that thought and the panic in you heart comes from the VHS tape. You are explicitly sure what is on it, but your detective senses tell you that it may contain you and what you did last night. 

The sun is so bright, you have to put a hand over your eyes. You walk around to the back of the store to take a piss behind the dumpster. As you unzip your pants your realize you have no underwear on. This is confirmation you hooked up with someone. Your detective skills are kicking into high gear. However, it is still speculation and would not hold up in court as you could easily place some reasonable doubt in the minds of a jury. You can only confirm that you are without underwear and while your lack of underwear in the past is an indication of a Grinder hook up,  at this point it is only speculation. You choose to place reasonable doubt in your mind, which has now sobered up enough to be your jury. You want to forget you are without your underwear. The addiction to forgetting is failing at the moment. Half laughing-half tearing up, you wonder how many pairs of underwear you’ve left around this city. You stop that wondering as it requires counting. Counting sexual partners is never a good feeling in private.

Back at the car, you get on your knees in the Target parking lot to feel under the driver’s seat for the keys. You find lots of interesting things under the seat, but no keys. You find wrappers to fast food places you tell all your friends you refuse to go to. You talk a big game about how you eat healthy, but your once 29 inch waist is now ballooning to 33. They know you eat like shit and your friends must have a good go at you behind your back when you lie about what you eat. You are not healthy. You are the only coke head who gains weight the more coke you do. It is because you reward a three-day binge with delivery and fast food. The ability to go without food for three days minus some bread to soak up liquor is not unusual with your kind. The pounds melt off quickly as your body eats itself as the booze and coke and pills are not nourishment. You feel good about your ribs showing when you quickly drop pounds, only to hate yourself for a full lack of restraint when you put the pounds, and girth, back on when you inhale delivery and fast food for forty-eight hours afterward the three day fasting, if it could even be called that. 

You stare at the VHS tape and put it on the passenger floorboard and cover it with Taco Bell wrappers. Are you on it? You keep asking yourself that. You cannot deal with it right now. You want to forget you even have it. While the VHS tape mocks you, you are incredibly curious how you were able to sneak it out of whatever place you were. You need your phone to figure this all out. It is the tool the detective needs to solve this mystery. If only you had another Ambien to forget this moment in the moment. That is the beauty of a hypnotic pill, you are active and awake by all accounts, but you remember virtually none of it. You want answers and you want to forget this all. 

You are in shorts, so your knees become rubbed raw from the parking lot asphalt. When you stand, it looks like someone ran a fork over your knees, albeit lightly since the blood is only faint. You rub your hand over the blood and then lick it off your palm. Maybe you are a vampire since the blood tastes good. You are a vampire who can survive in the blazing Georgia sun since you have a small burst of energy and go to the passenger side and get back on your knees to search for keys.

Underneath the passenger seat are tiny bags. Lots and lots of tiny bags. Some clear, some green. That means you visited a few of your dealers. You wonder which ones since you have many and the colors of the bags are evenly divided by usage among them. There are over a dozen empty bags under that seat. How much money did you spend on cocaine in the last twenty-four hours? Crumbled ATM receipts are mocking you with shame. Don’t uncrumple them. Just don’t. You know you have cash advanced on your AmEx. That is an expensive endeavor you cannot afford. 

You have often fooled yourself into thinking you are saving money with the cash advances on your American Express card. You love how people brag about having gold and platinum AmEx cards at the liquor store, as if using a debit to get drunk is somehow less than using a gold card to get drunk. Drunk is drunk and you all are buying booze at the drunk liquor store. But the fool in you thinks that the miles you are acquiring makes up for the exorbitant cash advance fees. They do not. AmEx is the worst for you as they keep raising your debt ceiling to the heavens. Your debt ceiling should be the lilac bush that graces the landscaping at your place. In the end, you probably will trade those miles for a ticket for a dealer and you will only have used miles to buy more cocaine.  

Luck comes your way as there are one and a half bags with gritty, grimy poorly cut cocaine still in them. You collect the empty bags and walk over to the cart corral and dump the empty ones along with the ATM receipts in the trash can. You never did look at the crumbled receipts and this is a poor detective move on your part. No good memory detective would ignore and discard such important and critical evidence. 

Looking around the parking lot, it is empty but for a few cars on the side of the building. At first you wonder if the world has ended, and you are going to have to break in and steal all the over the counter sleep aids and allergy meds along with Diet Coke and candy. Maybe you’d get lucky, and they have a combo DVD/VHS player, and you can play that mysterious tape in your car before the grid fails. They film The Walking Dead near your place, and you’ve seen the star running in your neighborhood. They should film this zombie scene of your sin in the Target parking lot you are engaging in. It would be highly entertaining. Then it hits you, it’s Sunday and they don’t open till noon. Damn, an end of the world would be kind of good right now. It would help you not focus on this current situation. Most days it feels an end of the world may be the only way you stop doing cocaine. You wonder if there would be cocaine production in the post-apocalyptic Atlanta since everyone in Atlanta seems to be highly engaged in the consumption of this product. 

Still no keys. Open the hatch and sit on the back of it like you are tailgating to the saddest game ever and take two bumps to wake up enough to look for keys. You are so brazen now that you don’t even look around to see if anyone can spot you snorting cocaine. The privilege is indeed real that you exploit.

You have no memory of what you did with the keys. It is painstaking slow, but the memory detective knows well how to scour for the tiniest of things. When you are coming down from a weekender binge of drugs, you know how to search your apartment for just a little bit more. 

You fish through all the tote bags. Windex, Pine Sol, paper towels, Pledge, Clorox wipes. You only buy name brand cleaning products because you have a prejudice against generic brands. Particularly the glass cleaner. You have a frosted glass dinning room table that is perfect for cutting and snorting cocaine off and it deserves only the best cleaner. The cheap stuff just streaks. When you cannot sleep after a long night of partying you clean. You do this in silence as not to wake neighbors. Your ability to fold laundry in silence is impeccable. 

A giant bag of almonds is opened and spreading the hatchback. Cheese so cheap it’s just vegetable oil now that it has melted in the greenhouse you call a car. You take the oily cheese and internally debate if you should dump it in the trash. That would be a waste of money to throw it out. The irony of concerning yourself with $2.99 cheese, while you clearly spent hundreds last night on coke and booze is not lost on you. But booze and coke were consumed, not tossed into the trash, so it’s not a total waste of money. 

You begin to methodically search the car, inch by inch. Flip the visors, pull everything out of the glove box and throw it on the floor. You search inside, underneath, and even rummage through the trash you threw out already. All you find in the trash are all those tiny empty baggies that let you know you did copious amounts of cocaine all weekend. The exhaustion is so palpable you worry it will cause something far more harmful than the rails of cocaine you have done. Since divine intervention does not work in situations like this, you refuse to consider that divine intervention or inspiration forced you to lift up the clapboard in the hatch where the spare tire is, but there they are. Keys. Fucking keys. That means you can go home. You will be safe in your home and can become the memory detective to figure out what you did for the last day. You can figure out a way to watch an unlabeled VHS tape that may or may not contain you on it having sex. 

Driving is a gamble at this point, but you do it anyway. You aren’t fully aware of the last time you ingested the cheap red wine but feel steady enough to drive the 2 miles home down Briarcliff road to the Little Five Points neighborhood where you live in a tiny one bedroom condo. 

You are touched with an innocent look that even when pulled over, cops would never assume you have had so much cocaine in tiny baggies in your car that you would go to prison for a long time. You have spent an adult lifetime getting out of things due to your innocent look and your white race. Back in the days when Atlanta had 24 hour nightlife, and before share rides were invented, cops would often put up checkpoints near the clubs. You were filled with so much bravado that you would willingly drive up to them knowing you’d never get pulled for a sobriety test. 

Your lawyer friend told you not to buy your coke in tiny bags due to the distribution rule. It made you laugh because it’s clear you will never deal because you can only consume. You are drug dealer brand specific and therefore stuck with tiny bags. You’ve been pulled over plenty of times with drugs in your car. However, you are a white, middle-aged man with tiny stature, thick glasses, and have an eager to please mannerism. All work in your favor to limit suspicion and they have gotten you through many sticky situations. 

This morning there are no cops on Briarcliff looking to stop druggies and drunks. They are at the churches ready to do traffic control since Atlanta church traffic is spectacularly horrible. Thank god it’s not yet noon and all the churches on Briarcliff Ave haven’t let out. Being stuck in church traffic may be precisely the thing you need to spend time pondering your situation but being home sounds better. You think about all those people in church, and you used to think they didn’t have fun on Saturday nights and that is why they are in church. You no longer think that thought since your life is no longer fun. You wonder if it ever really was fun to live like this. 

As you drive home, you glance at the clock that reads 9:45 and think about your neighbor you would like to avoid. You are fascinated with a neighbor that is so beefed up; you are sure his testicles have shriveled up to the size of peas from excessive steroid use. This assumption is not fully unfounded as you often see him shirtless and he’s full of bacne. Your friend used to tease you that you were always cruising him, and in a way you were, but not for sex. You had an insatiable and unacceptable desire to pop all those tiny pimples on his back. There are hundreds. You had purchased many zit popping tools off the internet that would be a joy to rake over that infestation of his. You are sure there is mutual disgust you both have for each other for your individual illegal drug usage. His groans, when he lifts weights, sound like the groans of your gay porn and you both hate each other’s respective groans that come through the shared wall. You are sure he refuses to see your excessive masturbation to gay porn as exercise, but that’s only because he has no idea how much labor is involved. It is exercise. 

When you get home, you realize you failed to plug the phone into the cigarette lighter in the car, so you plug it into an outlet in the bathroom and shower. When you are done the texts arrive from the weekend. 

did you leave

I’m waiting for you

$180

How much U want

Versatile

How much longer

We are at The Fountainhead

Come over

what the fuck happened to you?????

“I’d like to know,” you responded to the last one.

You notice a peculiar lack of punctuation in texting among your circle except when using too many question or exclamation marks for affect. 

While the texts are clues to what happened, they can be misleading. You respond benignly to them. None of the texts mentioned a VHS tape. That tape now sits atop your television begging to be played. You can’t. No VCR. You want to see this tape. You fear this tape. 

You scroll through your texts and find and invitation for happy hour that came through midday.  It was far too enticing to take the car home and instead you got a share ride. You rushed to happy hour as the sender of the text was a friend who surely had cocaine on him at that moment. 

You take that Uber to Mi Barrio because your car is safer overnight at Target than the restaurant, where it surely would get towed. You know this firsthand from having your car towed in the past. In the end, it didn’t matter as the desire to get to cocaine was so strong that you were willing to abandon the car and head to Mi Barrio for shredded tongue tacos and margheritas so sour they make you hurl the tacos. This is a repeated problem you have with your favorite restaurant. But the bathrooms are single stalled with a lock on the door, perfect for drug usage, even if the margaritas are sour. You open your bank account on your heavy laptop with a Postal Service sticker on it and indeed you spent around fifty bucks at Mi Barrio. 

Open up your share ride app and piece together yesterday’s map. It is a maddening zig zag around Atlanta that looks like a millipede crawling over the map on your phone. Flashes of images are burning your brain that include a tall, mustached man in really faded Wrangler jeans in a home you’ve never been to with a brown recliner, Mi Barrio’s bathroom, coke dealer who wears Stevie Nicks knockoff lacy clothes, bars but you’re not positive which ones since so many have the same stools, and you can only see the images of tall chairs, Kroger, drag queens, and ping pong. It is the man in faded jeans you need to figure out. While you made up the Wrangler jean detail when you retell this story, the mustache is indeed real. You are positive this is the link to the VHS tape. 

After Mi Barrio the next ride is to your friend’s home in the Virginia Highlands neighborhood who is not the same friend you had shredded tongue tacos with. This is ping pong friend. Ping Pong is a real friend, not a coke friend. Ping Pong does not do coke. Ping Pong is where you play ping pong and video games. You play ping pong with a two-handed backhand because you have tiny hands. It also distracts people to watch and allows you many free points. Your thirty-ninth birthday party was a ping pong tournament a friend organized, not Ping Pong though. 

You weren’t picked up at Ping Pong’s home but at The Highland Tap hours later. The Tap is your favorite basement restaurant about half a mile from Ping Pong’s home. You must have walked there from your friend’s house, which is strange since he and his wife are so against you walking places alone since you were mugged not that long ago, but that was in DC not Atlanta you tell them each time they call you a car. The idea of another meal is impossible since you were doing so much coke. You check the bank and the amount spent there is truly a meals worth and then some, but you will safely assume that is booze, lots and lots of booze. The bank account shows many transactions at three restaurant bars in that neighborhood. This is a common technique among drunks to prevent being refused service. Bartenders won’t notice your slurry mannerisms until the request for a third. Order two doubles of gin and tonics then move on to the next drinking place. Your bank account shows you hit Surin and George’s along with The Tap.

The share ride app shows you were picked up at George’s restaurant and taken across town to your place around 7pm. That gives you relief. You aren’t the worst pet owner in the world. You were home by dog’s dinner time and walk. And you stayed home for a reasonable amount of time. By reasonable you mean enough time to do all your coke, get on Grindr, and head back out before midnight.  

Uber shows you were picked up at home and taken to your favorite drag bar, Friends on Ponce. It is your favorite drag bar because the comedy queens are not insult queens. You once walked out of The Armory drag show ten minutes in when the queen called you the illegitimate son of Harry Potter and Rick Moranis. While you freely make fun of yourself, you don’t enjoy random drag queens doing this. While you immediately left that night you have appropriated this joke and use it to make fun of yourself often calling yourself Rick Moranis’ illegitimate son.

You like Friends on Ponce because you are allowed to walk into the manager’s office without even knocking. Not because you are cool, not because you are fun to hang out with, but because you are unassuming and spend large amounts of cash on her coke. The drag queen manager is aging like you. It’s as if you are the two last persons standing at the club at closing time. She has injected filler into her cheeks, and it’s hardened strangely, but she is kind to you and you have a long history of back room drug use together. This history means she won’t cheat you when selling you coke. It’s never cut too painfully. She also uses those tiny old glass containers sometimes to sell her coke which makes you feel like you time traveled to the 80s. 

You stay at Friends on Ponce for what looks like the length of time for one show and then Uber shows you were taken to across town to the East Atlanta Village. Your dealer there has red hair and a long leather jacket that looks like the one Spike wears on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He hangs out at The Eastside Lounge. Looking at the bank website you spent money at Flatiron and The Earl as well. By 1a.m. the bank receipts show you were back at Eastside Lounge looking for more coke.

Uber shows you made your way to Little 5 Points neighborhood, to Wicca dealer. You are not sure she is actually into Wicca, but she wears black lacy dresses that remind you of Stevie Nicks. Her coke is unpredictable in quality, but she likes you and lets you hang out a lot. You live only a quarter-mile from her, but around two-thirty in the morning it shows you were taken from her place to an address way outside the perimeter highway. There must have been a really good reason for you to go outside the perimeter (OTP) since you are an ITP (inside the perimeter) kind of guy. There is a divide in Atlanta regarding the perimeter highway I-285. Either you live inside it or not. If you are outside, you are basically a suburbanite and therefore uncool. But this was not your first foray OTP to find sex. But this may be the answer to the mystery of the unmarked VHS tape. 

Dick pics. It must be dick pics, so you scroll through your Grindr app to see if there are any exchanges longer than the standard formalities of “what’s up?” and “Looking?” There are none. Of course not, you are middle aged, barely acceptable in looks, and not at all in shape. Atlanta Grindr is for the opposite of you. Why you won’t delete that app is silly since its lack of activity mocks you when you are on it. This makes you feel old. You are the person who has stayed at the party too long. You have overstayed your cocaine and party presence longer than anyone you showed up to the party with. 

You open Growlr, a much more acceptable crowd for your place in the gay pecking order. You find dick pics. You scroll through where you move beyond the response to “looking” that then include a large exchange of dick pics and others, then an address that matches the share ride app. You open Google and do a quick search for the address to get both the satellite and street view images. It is way far from the bar you were at, but the dick pic warranted it apparently that night. You message the man on the app and ask what happened. There is a red dot in the corner of his account pic indicating he is not online. You see this was one of the most expensive share rides due to surcharge time and the fact you tipped 100%. This is a common occurrence. You tip generously all the time even though you have exhausted all of your savings on coke. Years of dishwasher and waiting tables instilled that in you. It’s funny, your friends with far more lucrative careers tip way worse. Perhaps that’s why they have savings accounts, and you have crumpled receipts on your floorboard from cash advancing your AmEx.

You refresh your app an hour later and his dot is green. Probably still cruising for end of the weekend sex.

I was kind of out of it last night. 
Did we fuck?

Yes

Did I fuck you or you fuck me?

Yes

Which one is it?   

Both

Did we play safe?

Yes   

Cool   

Don’t contact me again

Wait. Did I act a fool?

Don’t contact me again
Wife home tonight 

The good thing about this exchange is that men with wives rarely give you trouble. Even if you acted a fool, there is no one for him to gossip to about it. While the downlow man is trouble sexually, he is not trouble socially. 

Flashes of images on a living room floor accompany that recliner in your mind. There is a television so large that it must have time traveled to Mustache Man’s home. It is one of those large televisions that were made before flat screens and required four men to deliver it due to the weight. You can see porn on the television in your fuzzy memory, but the most jarring is the sounds you can remember which are of women. Straight porn is a rarity to be playing in the background of your hook ups.

You look at the VHS tape. It’s got no labels and you are sure this came from Mustache Man’s home. You would love to know how you snuck this out, but try as you might, you cannot force that memory to come forward the way straight groaning porn does. Why do the auditory memories come easier to you than the visual ones? 

You make your way to Ping Pong’s Sunday night to avoid looking at the VHS tape on top of your TV. Your dog wants nothing more than to be with you, but you cannot be with yourself alone right now so you leave to avoid the tape and your memory. You take dog with you to play with Ping Pong’s dog.

You want to forget this weekend and all you did. You watch TV at his home and drink a copious amount of beer. Sundays are not a big deal since you have the summer off of work and the days blend together. But you form a plan to watch the tape. You will go to Goodwill and buy a used VCR. 

But Monday comes and you are hungover. You don’t leave your bed for two days except to walk the dog and answer the door to collect take out delivery. You masturbate continually during those days because masturbation is such a mentally focused activity it allows you to forget. You are addicted to forgetting what you did last weekend. You are addicted to forgetting what you did ten years ago. You need to forget. 

The VHS tape begins to collect a bit of dust over the week. By weeks end you go to Goodwill and buy a used VCR and watch it. You are not on it. But Mustache Man is, and he’s having sex with a woman that you will assume is his wife. He looks like the porn star John Holms. Tall, skinny, and very 1970s. You are relieved and panicked at once. Grateful you are not on it, but horrified you had sex with someone who lives in the suburbs with a mustache and a wife. You take a pic with your phone of Mustache Man and show it to Ping Pong the next weekend. 

“You had sex with him?” Ping Pong asks. “He’s twice your age and three times your height.”

“Yea. According to the Growlr app I indeed had sex with him,” you reply. 

“Fuck dude, he looks like the cheap version of Burt Reynolds. Wait, no he looks like a roadie for Lynyrd Skynyrd on meth. No. That doesn’t work. He looks like an extra in Boogie Nights who wants to be the Burt Reynolds of Boogie Nights. No. He looks like John C. Riley with feathered straight hair from Boogie Nights. I think Riley had a Stache in Boogie Nights.”

“If you say Boogie Nights one more time I’m going to fucking punch you in the face.”

“Well at least he doesn’t look like Philip Seymour Hoffman in Boogie Nights. Dude you have to stop taking the Ambien, or at least take in only when you are literally in your own bed with covers on.”

Ping Pong is right, at least you didn’t fuck a guy who looks like Phillip Seymour Hoffman in Boogie Nights. He is even more right that this yearlong foray into Ambien is bad.  But without it, your catch phrase you steal from him “well at least I didn’t fuck a dude who looked like Philip Seymour Hoffman in Boogie Nights,” wouldn’t exist. You exploit that catch phrase for years at dinner parties when retelling your story.  

The root cause of all of this is your worst addiction, far more dangerous than cocaine and booze. It’s a desire to forget. Why you want to forget is buried so deep in the recesses of your mind you cannot even recall the events that led to this addiction. In order to excavate that trauma you must rid your addiction to forgetting. The addiction to forgetting through booze and drugs has ingratiated your body so powerfully that you are unsure how to end this and begin the excavation process. Either way, pain will be involved. But what pain are you willing to endure first? The pain of withdrawal from the booze, pills and coke or the pain of figuring out why you desire to forget in the first place. What is your root trauma that got you into this mess in the first place?