Josephine Skinny Jeans: Chapter 4

They gave Lee a bunch of morphine in the ambulance and he came to vaguely, murmuring shit about God and mermaids. They slathered his shoulder in some rotten egg-smelling shit and wrapped it in thick cottony gauze. The girl EMT told me her name was Rebecca as she rinsed the blood off my hands in the little sink mounted on the side of the truck. I could see her mint green bra strap poking out, so I thought about fucking her against the jump seats, her shoving aside piles of elastic tourniquets and IV bags so I could penetrate her deeper. The ambulance bounced over a pothole and Lee vomited some orange shit onto my lap. Then he fell back asleep.

“Was this a suicide attempt?” Chuck the burly guido asked me while he sponged the sick off my pants.

“Nah. I mean, I doubt it. He's on mushrooms, he thinks he's made of wood.”

Chuck took notes.

They asked the same questions at the hospital, then sent me to the waiting room with some paperwork while they tried to put my roommate back together. I got stumped after "Mother's Maiden Name" and passed out in a yellow vinyl chair next to a lesbianic chick doing crossword puzzles and sobbing silently. In my dream I rode around naked in an ambulance picking up classy hookers while Lee drove, singing the theme song to "Happy Days" at the top of his lungs. The lady EMT was there, spread eagle on the gurney, priming her naked curves with IV bags full of lubricant. Unexpectedly mid-coitus, one of the hookers' glue-on fingernails sprouted out from the quick into a 3-foot claw and she began jabbing me with it, wide-eyed murmuring, "Knock knock. Knock knock. Knock knock."

"Knock knock. Knock knock, Brian. You alive in there?"

A face framed by tousled brown hair loomed into focus as my eyelids pried apart. Josephine was standing over me, tapping my forehead with her pointer finger. She was wearing an oversized Elmer Fudd t-shirt over a pair of boxer shorts with bananas on them and combat boots laced just below her knees.

"Good morning, darling. What brings you to the Emergency Room?"

I hurriedly sat up and angled my torso in an attempt to hide the crusted vomit still clinging to my crotch. I was not successful.

"So who puked on you, then?"

Josephine placed the inflection on the "you", as if she was inquiring who picked my name out of the Secret Santa hat.

"My roommate. He tried to cut his arm off while tripping."

The vision in Fruit of the Loom raised an eyebrow like she was expecting something more.

"Flesh wounds don't normally trigger the gag reflex..."

"Oh. Right. Morphine."

The girl whistled low. 

"You're lucky. That sounds like a blast." 

Her eyes were incredibly bloodshot, I began to notice.

"...Which part of that sounds like a blast?"

"Oh, all of it." The goddess scratched her elbow. "And I haven't been crying, if that's what you're thinking. I'm very very high. Do you want to smoke some weed, Brian?"

I did.

"My name's not Brian, you know."

We were crouched down in a far corner of the parking lot, smoking this sexy little joint I'd watched her roll all pink tongues and tiny fingers.

"Brian's a good name. It suits you."

Watching smoke pour from her lips was far more satisfying than any single pair of tits I've ever seen tumble out from a freshly unhooked bra. First time I've ever been hard while covered in a dude's fluids that weren't mine.

"Actually it really doesn't suit you. Guys who look like you always have semi-intellectual names like Mitchell or Avery, names as sensitive as their collections of skin-tight jeans and interchangeable personality traits so so cool that everyone every second will find them charmingly impressive and quirky. So I'm gonna stick with Brian and you keep Vlad or Chester or whoever buried waayy deep down. Like childhood trauma deep down."

Josephine was turning into an abstract impressionist oil painting of a girl backlit by the blue light of a pay phone. Her hair was a fantastic headdress of feathers and the pelts of woodland creatures, and her carelessly veiled insults were sounding more and more like free-form jazz on vinyl draped in liquid satin. I began to suspect she might be a god of some kind.

"Good shit, right?" She pointed at the jay with perfectly manicured nails. 

"My brother grows it in New City. Hydroponic, organic, orgasmic."

After a walk around the block Josephine told me her friend had tried to off herself for the fourth time since Christmas, which was why she was also in the ER waiting room.

"She's getting pretty serious about it: a bottle of Xanax, half a thing of drain cleaner, and she still had the energy to try and hang herself in our basement. I found her passed out on a bunch of those sticky roach traps, had to peel them off her face."

"Why doesn't she just buy a gun?"

Josephine shrugged. "She's against 'em."

Then she gave me outstanding head under a streetlight.