idea: in the time of chimpanzees i was a monkey. Butane in my veins, and I’m out to cut the junkie

Butane and the Broken Law

The air tasted like rust and stale sweat. It was the kind of smell that settles deep in the lungs and coats the throat like a fine, suffocating dust. I was a creature built for the shadows, accustomed to the rough bark of concrete and the silence of desperate men. In the time of chimpanzees, when the world was still figuring out how to be cruel, I was just a monkey—a thing pulled from the jungle and dumped onto the cracked pavement, swinging between hunger and oblivion.

Butane. It wasn’t a choice; it was the blood in my veins now. A thick, burning river that kept the gnawing emptiness at bay, but only by transforming thought into haze. It gave me speed, a manic clarity, and the ability to see the world in shades of blinding, dangerous blue. It eroded the edges of my mind until there was only instinct: survive, feed, take.

My business wasn’t grand; it was small-scale savagery. I tracked the weak spots in the city’s carcass. The junkie—he was a ghost, shuffling through alleys like a broken marionette, twitching with a desperate, rattling energy. He was a vessel of pure decay, a man hollowed out by his own choices, and that hollowness was currency to me.

Tonight, the hunger was an acute physical pain, sharper than any drug high I’d ever chased. It wasn’t just for the fix; it was for the control. The drugs were chaos, but controlling them—managing the exchange, knowing where the next drop would fall—that was power. That was the only territory left when everything else was stolen.

I found him near the docks, huddled beneath a busted streetlight that sputtered and died with every breath I took. He was shivering violently, his skin the color of old parchment stretched too thin over bone. His eyes were sunken pits reflecting the sickly yellow glow of the sodium lamp. He looked like a forgotten piece of driftwood, battered by the currents of despair.

I didn’t approach with menace; I approached with a strange, detached focus. We were two broken things meeting in the dark. I moved slowly, letting the haze wrap around my senses, making the distance between us feel both impossibly vast and terrifyingly close. The junkie smelled of cheap gin and profound sickness, a scent that spoke volumes about everything that had been lost.

“You’re thin,” I said. My voice was a low rasp, rough from disuse and chemical fatigue. It felt alien in the silence of the night.

He flinched, pulling his threadbare coat tighter. “I don’t have much,” he whispered, his voice cracking like dry wood.

I reached inside my pocket, feeling the familiar coolness of the vial against my palm. I wasn’t interested in his plight, or any grand philosophy. I was interested only in the transaction—the simple, brutal exchange of desperate need for something tangible. It was a contract written in sweat and desperation, sealed by the shared understanding that we were both just survivors playing deadly games in a world that offered them nothing but dust.

The air thickened with unspoken threat, the silence stretching until it screamed. The junkie looked at me, searching my eyes not for kindness or pity, but for the predatory hunger I carried. He saw the cold calculation behind the haze, the raw necessity of my existence. And in that moment, we were nothing more than two predators weighing the value of their spoils.

The exchange was swift and grim. A small amount passed between us—a flicker of chemical life for a measure of physical survival. It wasn’t about morality; it was about the brutal reality of interdependence. We fed each other in the darkness, temporary anchors in a sea of absolute isolation.

When it was over, the haze seemed to burn away slightly, leaving behind a residue of stark clarity. The junkie didn’t look at me again, already dissolving back into the shadows he inhabited. I stood there, feeling heavier than before, weighted by the memory of that transaction. It wasn’t satisfaction; it was simply another layer added to the relentless reality: this is how you live when the world has abandoned you.

I turned and walked away, melting back into the anonymity of the night. The butane in my veins pulsed, a constant reminder that I existed outside the boundaries of polite society. I was the monkey in the time of chimpanzees, driven by a singular, chemical imperative to carve out existence from the wreckage. And tomorrow would bring another hunger, another shadow, and the endless, cold necessity of cutting the next deal.