"Self, 3" Night time in Tuscawilla Park, particularly during the summer months, is sticky and humid; the sweaty darkness teeming with delusions and apparitions as headlights blink in and out of view; sirens echo in the distance along with the buzzing of mosquitos, the chirruping of crickets, the croaking of toads in the park's many … Continue reading “Night People: Portrait of a Degenerate”
Category: Night People
“Night People: The Eye Infection Incident”
Conjunctivitis (good ol' pinkeye) can be a real bitch if left untreated. I say this because what began as minor irritation and swelling in my right eye transformed over a period of several weeks into a blinding white-hot nightmare in both of my eyes. Let's start from the beginning, or as close to the beginning … Continue reading “Night People: The Eye Infection Incident”
“A Wandering Disappearance”
I knew a working girl who called herself Ashley. She wasn’t like the other burnouts who walked Ridgewood avenue in Daytona after dark: a thin, pretty blonde of twenty-seven with hazy blue eyes. She lacked the track marks and facial scabs the others had etched into their frail, dying bodies, and she had all of … Continue reading “A Wandering Disappearance”
Night People II: “Slope”
“Hey man, I know you.” The grimy, unkempt man was sitting in the doorway of an empty club or restaurant in Ybor, insisting he knew me. Puzzled, I told him I wasn’t sure he did; in fact, I was positive we had never met. All the same, he persisted, this time, revealing his name, as … Continue reading Night People II: “Slope”
Night People: Prologue
"Night People" is a series I'm working on about the various denizens of the dark and dismal streets I've run into whilst roaming America's forgotten backwoods highways and byways, and urban areas both before and after I became an addict myself. Each of these stories is true and is a portrait of someone I met … Continue reading Night People: Prologue
Night People I: A Living Ghost
The dark stretches out into forever, night’s infinite veil seeps across the sky, draped over the trees on either side of the highway in that ghostlike way that sheets cover furniture in the homes of the recently deceased; dual walls of towering black leviathans closing in on either side of the asphalt, split by reflective … Continue reading Night People I: A Living Ghost