Paco's Cough Syrup

Paco's Cough Syrup

Paco used to drink a bottle of cough syrup every day.  And sometimes, on ultra boring Friday nights, or even deviant Thursday mornings, Cole Rose would drink one with him.  Paco told Cole that when he would drink cough syrup, sometimes he, Paco, would see God.  And not just a vision of God, either, but actual God.  When this happened, Paco would look at God and, at the top of his lungs yell, "Fuck you, God!"

Cole said that cough syrup gave him a headache.  He could only drink it once in a while.  He didn't understand why Paco liked it so much.  Paco said a bottle only cost $5.49, and what was weed, like twenty bucks?  A week of cough syrup costs the same amount, Cole would argue.  Paco would always respond in saying it's not that hard to steal your own.  He told Cole that, listen, he wished he smoked more weed, much more, but he didn't really like reality anymore.  

Cole said Paco kept drinking cough syrup, and it "disassociated" him.  Cole said he's disassociated, too, but not as much.  He then said that Paco jumped off a bridge recently and laid on the ground for three or four days before anybody found him.  It was really bad, Cole said, and he didn't know if Paco was paralyzed or not.  He said Paco was now reading a lot of Carl Jung, however, and you need fingers for that.

We were sitting around my living room.  Cole had a large scab on his forehead.  He asked me why it felt like he had an arrow pressing into his forehead.  I asked him if it was just the scab, but Cole said no, "I feel that in a different place."  Then Cole started rapping.

I couldn't get Paco out of my head when I heard that he had jumped off a bridge.  What bridge could it have been?  How had he survived?  How high was the bridge?  What was his condition now?  

I wondered if it was the same bridge that my teacher had jumped from years earlier.  I remember when his problems came out, my teacher's, and I remember the very rapid, very public downfall.  For years his problems would cross into the shallows of community conversation, between parents, students, newspapers, family functions, aunts and uncles whom were also teachers--everyone knew his problems, so it wasn't much of a surprise when we heard he had jumped off a bridge.   The news was alarming, nevertheless; however, it was also a relief to know that he and others were no longer suffering.  Whether it was the insurmountable years of legal issues that caused him to leap, his anchoring alcoholism, or his irrevocable predilection for minors, boys mainly, he jumped off that bridge that divides my home county from where I live now.  

I remember when I was little, I used to imagine what it would feel like to free fall, like a raindrop, but I could never imagine hitting the ground--that idea wouldn't even cross my mind.  But now every time I drive to my father's house in Woodbine, I cross into my home county and picture the falling body of my teacher beneath me, falling in a dream world beneath my feet.  I still can't imagine his body hitting the ground.

Anyway, a railroad track runs along a tributary of the Patapsco, probably ten stories beneath the bridge, right between Howard and Baltimore County.  If there is a moment to pull your eyes off the highway, you can glimpse at the tree tops below.  

It had been a weird few weeks when I was hanging out with Cole, but maybe it was just the winter.  We tried playing music together, but we were always too fucked up.  It was around that same time when someone found David Pomp laying decrepit in some bushes behind his friend's house.  I think he laid there for hours.  His friend said David went on the roof to smoke a cigarette--they were drinking lots of Kentucky Gentleman--but after waiting long enough to wonder, his friend went upstairs and climbed out onto the roof to check on him, finding in a perfect line David's shoes, phone and wallet, all lined at the edge of his rooftop.  When he looked over the edge, he saw a homeless man pulling David's broken body out from the bushes along the pavement.  Everyone was screaming for help, except David, obviously.  His blood was spread like a comet tail along the ground; and there was blood on the bricks of the wall, and on David.  They took him to the hospital and immediately performed spinal surgery.  When David finally came to, he had to tell everyone what happened.  The hardest part is that he didn't know what happened.  He had no answers for landing on the wintery ground three stories below, behind those bushes, whether he had slipped drunkenly, or something worse.  He didn't know what compelled him to fall, though 'fall' may not be the correct choice of word, especially when hovering above all of us was a very painful and black truth; it was swirling and gleaming and shooting sparks.  Even David knew it was there, the truth above our heads, that we could all put ourselves in that place again, that exact moment on that rooftop where he was smoking a USA Gold one minute, and the next week-long minute explaining why there is no feeling in either of his legs.  He had to tell us, "I don't know if I tried to kill myself."

Paco had a similar experience--he doesn't know if he tried to kill himself, either.  He doesn't know how he got to the bridge, nor the edge of the bridge, but he does remember falling.  He felt his head hit something as his feet hit the shallow water.

He said that when he came to, a while after he had hit the ground, that even though he was gasping in pain, there was a wet leaf stuck to his face.  It started to rain.  He confirmed that he was not dead.  At first, he didn't know why he should even be dead, but a few moments later it all made sense--if he jumped off that bridge then he should be dead, or at least hurt very badly.  He confirmed that he was hurt very badly.  It took all he could to roll over in the shallow water.  He crawled as much as he could out of the water and onto the pebbly shore.  He laid there motionless until the next day when it started to rain again, but much harder than the day before.  He spent the portion of that storm crawling to the bridge.  He doesn't remember waking up after that, but he remembers the next day being covered in flies.  He wondered about his death and how he would die.  He agreed with himself that he would probably die of starvation because there was no one down there.  That's when a couple in their twenties arrived.  

Paco says his love for cough syrup started after his first meltdown.  He says he has always felt himself going crazy, but he has always wished to be actually crazy so he wouldn't know it was all happening anymore. He's only now in the process of going crazy, but he's not actually crazy, at least not anymore, not like when was actually actually crazy, before the DXM and the cough syrup and the Triple-C's, back when he had his first manic breakdown.  

Paco told his parents that he thinks his first manic episode was caused by ingesting too much LSD at one time.  But it could be anything, he says, which is a shame because he loves LSD except for losing his mind.  He says LSD pushed him towards an understanding with Kenny Rogers, or at least his lyrics, "I just stopped by to see what condition my condition was in."  It was shame, the meltdown.  He said the world got heavy and pushed the heavens onto him.  He passed out in his bedroom and woke up seeing trails, more and more trails, that he thought about Kenny Rogers and then immersed fully into a blackout.  His blackout lasted an entire week until he woke up hearing his girlfriend's voice in a hospital room.  He was forced to stay in the psychiatric ward for a month and a half, returning home to his girlfriend's request for a "break."  It wasn't even really a break, he said, but a break up.  He was depressed for months.  His life continued like that, until one day he and his friends were looking for some pot, so, in a hasty attempt to substitute anything with anything, they bought some Corcidin Cough & Cold.  He tripped hard in his mother's basement, fully understanding the unlimited integrity of T-Rex's Electric Warrior.  After that, cough syrup became his remedy, his combatant to the various psychoactive drugs the medical world put him on for his mania.


Under the bridge, he asked the young couple to call 911, but they didn't have a phone.  They offered him some heroin, but he declined.  He said he couldn't roll over to do it.  They wished him luck and continued into the woods.  He said thanks.  It wasn't until the next day that an extreme bicyclist found Paco under the bridge.  He has no idea what happened after that.

Paco walks with a limp now.  Actually, he walks sideways, or almost sideways, as if someone tried to snap an unpeeled banana at the middle.  He follows his feet carefully as they walk forward, his spine rearward, to the right a tad, pushing him back--as if an invisible limbo stick hung permanently at the center of his rib cage and he was forced into an eternity of avoiding it.  He walks as if the clouds are pulling him towards them in a magnetic field that does not reach his feet.  His feet are his engine, his wheels and his periscope.

From his halfway house, Paco dreams of being homeless again.  He was homeless three or four times, he thinks, and he loved it.  He dreams of playing lead guitar in a punk rock band.  He wants to be the singer, too, like Fat Mike from NOFX.  He wants to write a book about all of his experiences, and be an actor in some movies.  He wants to drink more cough syrup and smoke crack like when he was homeless.  He used to drink a bottle and read books at the library until the effects kicked in.  He would walk to a park and watch the world from his pineal gland.  He says it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society, just like Jiddu Krishnamurti says.  You just have to know your own condition.