My Nonfiction Story “I Am an Abscess” Was Published in J Journal

This true story, “I Am an Abscess,” is about a time when I sold drugs to high school kids with a heroin addict who was dating one of them.

He was in his twenties.

It was a pretty fucked up situation.

Here’s a snippet.

I Am an Abscess

I am dopesick and coked up in my apartment—four bedrooms and a loft I share with five other men.

Normal men.

Not men like me.

The loft is my bedroom, a narrow staircase leading up to it from the entryway, the high white ceiling a dozen feet above my head, my bed pressed against the half wall that overlooks the living room. It is a room of empty spaces, so that all might hear my long snorts of dope, my fights with customers, my shrieking in the night.

The three full walls I have are great and pale and high, one filled with long windows that let in sunlight all day long, the Kansas summer making the room burn with heat, even now in the middle of the night.

GT has stopped answering his phone. He may be in the hospital again for his diabetes, or he may be dead. I neither know nor care which it is—all that matters is that I am sick.

In six years, I’ll hear that GT fell asleep behind the wheel and drove into the Kaw River, all three hundred pounds of him sinking to the icy muck.

I won’t care then either.

You can read the whole story here.