I had left the shelter. It was a stupid thing to do, leaving a place of subsistence for a place that offered nothing but sickness…downtown Hollywood. I sat in a urine soaked corridor, watching people walk by unawares, and over time a line into a club on the corner street formed. Two women spoke to me, asking me questions and telling me they wished they could take me home. I wished they would; I needed someone to rescue me from the pit of fire I had leaped into.  Oddly enough, I wanted to feel this pain, and now here I was, homeless and at the mercy of strangers. After a while, a half hunched over African American man walking with a cane that he didn’t really seem to need passed me on his way to buy cigarettes. He was obvious in his noticing me, and on his return trip he stopped to ask me, like the women before him, questions. He told me he had a place for me to stay. I reluctantly yet willingly followed him. We arrived at a building, but it didn’t look occupied. I realized it was abandoned, and had been probably for quite a while. As we entered, a blanket of rank darkness enveloped us completely, and I became more scared then I had imagined I would on this night.  Within seconds we were stepping into an elevator with no light, and I wasn’t sure we’d make it to wherever we were going. Luckily we did make it to the top, although I was thoroughly convinced that we would die in that cramped steel box. I attempted to shake it off, continuing on until we reached his room. The doors on all of the rooms were reminiscent of sadistic hospital doors-the kind you see bloodied up in horror flicks, or the doors in the game Wolfenstein, splattered with crimson, opening and closing for the soldier who would soon shoot the next monster into eleven hundred meaty pieces. He shoved them open, revealing his sty. A starving dog was looming in the corner, hidden by the sickly shadows. The man gave me a tour; his home consisted of a rotting couch infested with cockroaches, a rank kitchen, and a toilet I dare not flush. On the table near the couch lay a pile of packaged needles, which I could easily guess what for. The needle exchange program provided him, like many others, with many more sessions of abuse, and I simply did not dwell on it at the moment. He left to fetch dinner, and I sat on the pasty couch, small and quiet, staring at the packages of needles. He came back with a plate of spaghetti, which he offered to me, but I respectfully declined. I don’t know why I couldn’t bring myself to eat it-I was hungry-but I had followed this slimy stranger into an infested shack above a sewer of a city, and I just couldn’t eat it. I watched him eat. He was a decrepit man, disheveled and sullen-looking, with poor and pathetic written all over his dull but harmless face. I found comfort in his gesture to house me, and even though he was questionable, he seemed to be mostly a good man. When the day turned to evening, there was no light except a small bulb illuminating the yellow walls around us, and it was not clear whether the walls were yellow from the light or from the layers of grit and grime collected over the years from squatters passing through. The table in between us dictated the night’s events. The man prepared a mixture called “glass,” asking me if I’d ever heard of it. I was trying to act cool, like I was on the up and up, but he surely could see through this, as the words “haven’t heard of it” came out of my mouth, pitiful and naive. He prepared the needle, sucked the solution into the syringe, and asked me whether I wanted to do it myself or have him do it for me. I wouldn’t have known what to do if I tried, so I asked him to do it. I was at the ultimate low point of my career as a human being; I asked a stranger to stab my vein with a needle full of drugs. In Junior High School a group of teenagers did a presentation on AIDS and needles and drugs. At thirteen years old, I knew I would never put a needle into my arm. I had promised myself it would never happen. How wrong I was.Everything was fine, as much as it could be, and it took a bit for the drug to kick in. Once it did I couldn’t go to sleep. We stayed up for a while, and when he saw my Discman he told me he could try to get me some money for it if I wanted. He was going out to take care of some business, and would return in a few hours. As he left, I realized I was now alone in a shithole, completely vulnerable, without knowing where my location left me, without knowing a single soul around me, without a soul myself. He was gone for what seemed like an eternity. I sat myself on a corner of the couch, staring at one wall and then the next, at my pornographic magazine, then out the single ratty window that offered a bleak existence. I paced, and sat down again. It came out of nowhere-I heard a very loud noise, exactly like that of a gunshot, and immediately jumped down to the ground. I scurried behind the couch, covering myself with all of my clothes and my travel bag, but it wasn’t enough. My mind whirled with thoughts of my own demise; the thoughts came faster and faster, as my heart raced with the same speed. I knew exactly what would happen now. The gunman would see me, and he’d be a giant gangster with a silencer or revolver. I pictured him pointing it at my head, blowing my brains all over the place. I didn’t want to die; I wanted to lose myself and never turn back-to bury who I was or who I thought I was and live without caring-and I was doing a bang up job…but I didn’t want to die.  I sat in a squatting fetal position for at least an hour before the man came back from his venture. I was embarrassed, but mostly in shock, and I told him about the noise. He walked down to the nearest neighbor and came back shortly, with the report that it was just a steel door slamming. I wasn’t too convinced, but I had to believe it, because there was nothing I could say or do otherwise. He fell asleep on the couch not much longer after his return, but I was wide awake now. I sat next to him and watched his chest rise and fall, periodically talking to him in hopes that he’d wake up and talk to me, poking him gently with my hand…but he was asleep, or at least pretending to be, which was surprising to me since he was clearly a junky. I figured all tweakers never slept, because I never did. Drugs do strange things to the human body and mind.  It is amazing how easily time can ebb and flow, then stand completely still when your body is under the influence of a narcotic. As the sun broke through the window, I peered outside and saw the deserted streets and old buildings lining the sidewalks. A large pit of sadness filled my stomach. A stranger walked into the room; he was tall with rich chocolate colored skin, shiny and sweaty, and from the size of his muscular arms I guessed he was probably into steroids. He began to walk towards the needles piled in the center of the table. He looked at me with the expression “who the fuck are you?” and then soon did not care, for he had gotten what he came for. He grabbed a handful of the packages, momentarily looked at the man on the couch beside me, mumbled a question I couldn’t answer with more than a half-nod of my head, and then began walking back out of the room. The man beside me had still not awakened, and it started to dawn on me that he never would.  I neatly placed one of my collared shirts across his chest, gathered my things, and headed out of the room. I made my way to the elevator in a trance-like state. Astonishingly, I found my way back and as I descended down to the bottom floor. I could not believe that I made it out of there by myself. The sun was shining and the bags under my eyes screamed for sweet slumber, but I was too jacked up to rest now, and I had to find another place to go. I could never stay in one spot for too long, because the reality of the situation might set in, and I might panic, or realize what a stupid fool I was for choosing to live this way. I wondered if I might have a secret death wish. The shelter was close, so I headed in that general direction. I didn’t know what would happen next, but I had now reached a new level in this sick and twisted game I was playing. I had crank pumping through my blood, a bag that was my life rolled up into a ball of cloth, and much more damage to do. I set off into the streets, not knowing, not caring, frightened and alone, waiting for a miracle to save me.