Ted & Liz

 

In my association with Joe Bowles I chanced to meet several colorful personalities of diverse origins. I should like to reflect upon a pair of them at this point. Our speed connection for a time was a couple who went by the monikers of Uncle Ted and Aunt Liz. Ted’s misfortune and Liz’s good luck had brought the two of them together, and a more unlikely duo I have never met.

Ted was 73 years old, a tornado expert with the National Weather Service, and a lay reader with the Catholics. He had played professional football in the 1930s for a time and was extraordinarily robust for a man of his age at the time of our first meeting. Ted’s wife had died a couple of years prior to this time after lingering for nine years with Alzheimer’s disease. Apparently this had left Ted somewhat unhinged. Ted had only recently moved Liz into his house to help him manage his affairs and keep him company. I have no reason to believe their relationship antedated his wife’s passing. However, Liz was not universally known for her chaste virtue and moral rectitude in the neighborhood. They were lovers, but only incidentally. Liz was tending Ted more than loving him. He was a perfect host-organism for a young speed-whore with few requirements – and they have few requirements. Ted had obviously negotiated a compromise with the world, and he was gonna smile while he ate that open-faced Shit Sandwich.

Liz was 29 and no beauty. Her body seemed to lack any sort of density, no matter what weight she was sporting. The flesh seemed to resent the effort of staying on her bones. I always had the sense that I could push my hand right through her. She had a cadaverous complexion. As a child she had played in the mud in dirty underwear in the Love Field neighborhood where Ted and his wife had lived. At some point Liz had been in a pretty bad car wreck and had lost all her teeth, whereupon she began sporting a set of ill-fitting store-boughts. Her ship really came in when she moved into Ted’s house. She got him to try speed and shortly had him hooked on it for her sake. I got the feeling he’d have tried rat poison if it would have kept her around. Ted was a broken man with a about $90,000 stored up when she moved in with him, so she was banking with him big time. She had a supply handy of the best crystal meth available in north Texas at the time, and she got Ted to finance a little dope-selling business to keep her supplied.

The problem with Liz’s plans was her and Ted’s combined taste for the Evil E. After a few weeks of providing me and Joe with the most hateful shit around, the quality began to suffer from their combined tampering. Liz would cut into the product to supply her habit, not knowing that Ted was doing the same thing behind her back. Toward the end there was much more cut to the mix than there was dope. And there was no telling what she’d come up with to cut the shit with. Anything from Mannitol to vitamin B to Sweet-n-Low would end up in the spoon once all the available speed was drawn up.

Watching the two of them go at it with the rigs was a sight to behold. First Ted would bare his arm, which was fairly muscular for a man of his years. Then he’d jack himself up like a pro with a thick bump of the best dope to be had at any price and sit there like a baby bird with his mouth open while Liz squirted the sanguinary wash into his gaping maw. For hours afterward, Joe and I would listen as he told and retold stories from his past. Ted weren't no chipper. He could stand toe-to-toe with any of us in the crowd and do just as much dope as we did. I wondered at his fortitude to take that kind of punishment. He’d fill himself a glass of Kentucky Deluxe from the plastic jug in the cupboard and mix it with whatever was handy—usually Diet Dr Pepper—and then he’d take his place in the easy chair and not get up for hours while we all sat there grinding our teeth and chewing our tongues as he mumbled about the past. He was a truly nice man.

Liz was altogether more gruesome about her task. Most of her veins were fairly well corrupted and hard to find. She had to get creative about where to poke herself. Usually, it was up to me to hold her arm while she tried to find a viable entry for her outfit. I vividly remember watching her dig into the back of her hand between her thumb and index finger probing for a legitimate hit. After several tries she finally found a spot. What came into the rig as she registered looked less like blood than some sort of black cottage cheese curdling up in little vortices of goo inside the only slightly less viscous dope mixture of the syringe. I was fascinated and revolted, but I couldn’t turn away. I’d seen Liz finally give up on more than occasion and stick the half-used blood shot in the fridge for a try at a later time when we were both a little less shaky. She was a true dope fiend cut from the worst cloth available. She once had to go to Parkland Hospital to get an abscess behind her knee lanced. They have little sympathy at the emergency room for drug addicts, and I thought it was just recompense for her to suffer a little for her art.

The two of them were more demonstrative in their affections than I would have expected from their circumstances. It wasn’t for public benefit that they would kiss or embrace as much as for their own. Ted always sat unaccompanied in a dusty old armchair and Liz would drape herself over whatever was handy. I don’t remember a great deal of color in the house. Everything is my memory brings it all up in faded olive drab and a layer of dust. It was like walking into a snapshot from the Fifties where the colors are a bit washed out and you assume most of the people pictured are already dead. There was a faded color to everything but Ted and Liz; they were washed in halftones and pasted over their surroundings with a bit of rubber cement. Their intimacies bore the same stamp. The affected an air of familiarity inadequate to the duration of their acquaintance. How invasive the couplings must have been between such strangers – like fucking in a fever dream when it hurts to feel anything.

It was at Liz and Ted’s that I ate the only meal I had during June 1987. We had a little barbecue in the backyard. Joe and I had been up for about eight days at this point, and Liz invited us over for chicken at their place. It was an effort to nibble at the food and wash it down with cheap whiskey while my brain raced and the trees grew right before my eyes. Ted was in high spirits and talked a blue streak while Joe and I muttered to one another in our own special language. It was surreal. Liz was downright domestic that day.

My last encounter with Liz during this period was at about three in the morning late in the month. Joe and I had run out at the worst possible time and took a trip to their house in his green pickup to see what might be had. We knocked quietly at the door. There was never any question as to waking them up. The thought wouldn’t have entered our minds. The pair of them were most likely the only people in Dallas County at that time who had more crystal in their bloodstream than Joe and I had in ours. The door opened, and there stood Liz wearing only a dirty grey slip and holding a Mossberg 12-gauge riot gun in her hand and a rig full of dope between her toothless gums. She perked up at the sight of us and, as if her appearance were the most natural thing in the world, invited us across the threshold. We took our seats in the living room. Liz sat down and looked at us straight-facedly and said, "We’re gonna institute a no-rig policy here at the house. Things are getting a little outta hand with all the fiends around here." Joe and I were in a state of sympatico at this point, so I knew he was having just as much trouble keeping himself from doubling over in laughter as I was.

Things fell apart for Uncle Ted and Aunt Liz soon after I got out of rehab a few months later. I ran into her about a year and a half after that dream time we had spent in each other’s company. She was living in the apartments where I now reside, and she had a newborn baby of an unknown sire. She had put on weight and looked like normal white trash at that point. To hearken back to the past while watching that faded welfare madonna clutching new life to her bosom gave me pause to shudder. The juxtaposition of those images didn’t quite jive in my mind, and I was glad to take my leave of her after a short visit. I haven’t seen her since.

I ran across Ted shortly thereafter. He had lost his house and had none of his fortune left after his time with Liz. He was living in a cheap flophouse in east Dallas and was bereft of a lung. He had an oxygen tank sitting beside him and took his air with heroic effort. It was a difficult encounter, but I was glad to see Ted again. I brought him some cantaloupe and a newspaper and stayed for a little while to visit. I didn’t dwell on the past but only expressed my best wishes for his continued good health. I’m sure he’s long dead at this point. He weren’t no chipper, that one.

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