by HANNAH HARLEE

The Wild West

Hannah Harlee | AUG 2023 | Issue 26

My best friend lives in San Francisco, in a room in Polk Gulch that fits a double bed and a table for $1100 a month. Weekdays he gets up early and does manual labor, then walks to the Tenderloin to buy heroin when he has the money for it and Xanax when he doesn’t. This week, he has the money.

I’m staying at his place, just a few days until I can move into my new apartment. Tonight, he shoots heroin in front of me for the first time. I watch; I stay very still and keep very quiet, and when I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror, I discover I’m holding both hands, open-palmed, to my face.

He finishes and sits inside his high for a moment, then puts on his jacket to walk to the Tenderloin and cop one more time. Before he goes, I tell him his fly is unzipped.

“Ah, thanks,” he says, and zips up. “All the junkies would’ve laughed at me.”

He leaves and I try to read. I keep shifting on his bed, setting the book beside me then picking it back up and searching for my spot. When he returns, he’s carrying a donut from Bob’s, chocolate-glazed and still hot. He hands it to me in a grease-spotted paper bag and I eat on his bed while he prepares his next fix. He pinches the metal handle of a tiny aluminum pot between his thumb and forefinger, then removes the sticky black tar from its plastic wrap and drops it in the pot. As he holds a flaming lighter beneath it, he could be a character in a children’s book panning for gold. Yosemite Sam under a sapphire sky warming beans over a campfire. Out here in the Wild West.

When the square in his pot turns to bubbling syrup, he looks at me and asks, “Do you need a reminder on how to bring me back to life?”

I say yes and he pulls open his paraphernalia drawer, takes out the Narcan, and walks me through it: break this open, fill this syringe, insert here. In the ass muscle, he says.

“I never want to have to do that,” I say.

“You won’t,” he says.

The next day, I am imprinted with an afterglow of anxiety, like a hangover. I’m trembly and high-strung, unable to focus. He’ll continue to shoot up in front of me, in his home, in public parks, but it will never become comfortable. I will always feel complicit, like I’m the one injecting into the crook of his arm. Like I’m in the room with someone as they take their own life, holding eye contact until the light falls out of their eyes.

Hannah Harlee is the founder of ARTWIFE, a digital literary and arts magazine. She has an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Sierra Nevada University, where she served as the managing editor and faculty advisor for the Sierra Nevada Review. Her work has been published in The Rumpus, The Normal School, Entropy, Hypertext, and Litro. She lives in San Francisco with her wife.