Part 1i. Elevator Johnson was on his way to wait.

 

I looked up and out the Wo Hop basement window. There was a ridiculously tall man crouched down in stripe flared pants with a blue jacket, low heel boots and a satin banded white hat which gave him the look of an uncle sam parody without a beard.

Elevator Johnson was his name. It was his real name. I'm not sure why.

Herman stopped unwrapping his foil triangle of chicken. "His parents thought he would already grow up to be tall, and so that was his name." Seems like as ridiculous and unlikely an excuse for naming a kid elevator as any I've heard before. So it may be true.

When unlikely reasons for something pair up they usually set the expectation baseline back down past perceptual zero, and in the right environment just about any argument can seem sensible, no matter how rotten the explanation really is.

Elevator Johnson was on his way to wait when he noticed the party and Herman through the Wo Hop basement window behind the glass.

When I say Elevator Johnson was on his way to wait I mean he was on his way to wait; going to a predetermined meeting place to wait for a connection he already knew wouldn't arrive. 'On the wire' as he called it.'

He lived in the moment between the fixing of habits and the contact of strangers. This condition of placement coupled with his constant state of deficit need, put Elevator Johnson in a position of always waiting for something; contact, money, drugs, difference, just about anything a regular person takes for granted.

The time of a junky is measured in the availability of a fix and the space between each one. Life by stopwatch. As long as the addict is within range of the fixing mechanism, the time spent between fixing is incidental.

As Burroughs once defined, in his book Junky, the term 'running on junk time', in which for a junky the time between fixes is just there to be filled until it's time for the next shot, that is, as long as one is available. Otherwise the time is spent trying to secure the next fix.

For Elevator Johnson, after years of incompetence and the inability to plan ahead in order to obtain the fix before running out, it was the time spent waiting between fixing that had eventually become the habit itself.

Like a junky of any type, Elevator Johnson had at some point become trapped in the circular pattern of waiting for a fix and then preparing to find the next one, and his life grew and folded around a pattern of addiction to the cycle in itself.

However, unlike a regular junky, addicted to a drug that doesn't exist and would never arrive, Elevator Johnson, in a state of convenience, had somehow developed an addiction to the waiting period between fixes and the disappointment in anticipation of withdrawals.

In order to achieve this he still had to seek the warm orgasmic capillary flush bang bringing the release of getting right and the simple state of homeostasis that followed. But barely ever obtain it.

Ice under the nails instead, static dust in the lungs, steel wool under the eyelids and everything vibrating crackle blue. Facial muscles curling and that feeling of a sideways sweeping shift of the floor. A sense of disconnected nostalgia, similar to the brief condition when coming on to acid, but lasting for days and without the release of an effective distraction.

Familiarity, even the red eyed sand in the skin chill of withdrawals or a punch in the face every morning before school, familiarity of any type can translate into habit.

Funny thing is, for Elevator Johnson to get his inverse fix of never actually getting right, he had to continually ruminate on and seek the fix, but only obtain it enough to continue the withdrawal pattern; keep enough junk in his body to tease the cells into noticing it's not enough.

Living in this continual state of deficit need forcing him into the moment, if there is one thing that brings a person into the present, it's withdrawals, and because of it Elevator Johnson never acknowledged the possibility of a future, and so he had none. He was stuck in the present forever, and the best he could hope was for the changes around him to be gentle as time went sliding past him.

Elevator Johnson was well aware of his condition. Life by stopwatch, addicted to waiting. He was an observer and not a participant;

resigned to document a life rather than live one. He didn't have enough hope to spread around for himself to think what may or may not become of the document, and in rare times when he wasn't uncontrollably forced into complete focus on his present condition, he would become concerned about what he may not leave behind.

These thoughts however were brief and forgotten against the rest of his general condition.

Before the committee came to power, it was much easier for Elevator Johnson to maintain this condition in a pure state. The limited access to illegal drugs of any type created a velvet rope distribution funnel through which the addict was supplied and the scarcity of the drug created a high margin pricing structure that had an entire exchange economy resting on it's foundation.

The limited availability and inflated cost of drugs caused an illegal trade of stolen goods, which had companies justify working predicted losses into their pricing structures, and caused a need for people to replace stolen items, items often manufactured in prisons filled with people working for pennies on the hour, incarcerated for selling, possessing, or even being in the presence of, the illegal substance.

And so there were many ways an addict could miss the mark for a connection, either because of artificially created rarity, or strictly an inability to make the money required to meet the inflated prices.

However since the committee reclassified all previously illicit habits and illegal drugs, and set up the citizen run establishments and dispensaries, there was no longer the period between any type of fix where the addict had to wait for the dealer and come up with enough of whatever in order to fix.

This all caused Elevator Johnson to have to remap and come up with his own plan in order to maintain a condition of artificial scarcity to satisfy his need for the sensation and disappointment of the anticipation of junk sickness. His plan was neither intricate or graceful and there's no need yet to bore you with the details.

I watched as Elevator Johnson stood up from his crouching position, leaving now only his legs visible through the basement window.

He turned around and looked at the lighted activity in the windows along the intersecting streets, and slowly walked away until his figure was dissolved into the darkness down the boulevard in the direction of the park.

 

Coda 2: Choosing Socks It was difficult to explain to the girl why he had to clap three times.

Sometimes he'd wonder what it would be like to close the door without having to turn the lights on and off while humming.

He would have interesting fantasies about not being the kind of person celebrities send money to support programs for.

Sometimes he didn't want his t-shirt to have to must match the underwear.

There were some days when he was tempted not to take the five little clay green pills with food at bedtime.

One false move could cripple an entire day.

He thought it was a healthy step to choose socks with his eyes closed instead of spending hours ruminating over cause and effect.

Eventually all of his socks had some sort of comical charge, now he wears the same pair every day and leaved the rest in their positions in the drawer.

There were certain reasons for these abnormalities. All of them made complete sense until a regular person was involved by accident.

continue.