Stuck

"Don't get stuck."

Lance says this when I ask him for a word of advice.
or maybe it was Larry, or Louis, or something like that.
Anyways, it doesn't matter.

"Don't get stuck."
He says, late night in a Seattle hostel fresh back from Singapore or Thailand or somewhere stuck in prison for nine months, caught kissing a Muslim. He lifts a sleeve to reveal pits in his skin the size of cigar burns. Where the electrodes connected, he said, and shocked the fuck outta him daily stuck in a wet box nowhere in particular for kissing the wrong girl on the street. Emails telling him stay out of LA, old warrants still hot and no jobs that ain't under the table 'lest you wanna be stuck, stuck, stuck.

So I believed him, then. Look of Todd in his eyes...sad, feline eyes. Todd, in prison, in Tijuana, withdrawing from years of heroin and in there for almost two months now for carrying a knife in his pocket on the streets. He's american, must have money. Take him in and roust a few dolores. But he's just finished off his inheritance on cheap hotel rooms and TJ black. Stuck.

Woke up in a dream the other night yelling it.
"Todd is dead! Todd is dead!"
I don't know why I knew.
Then wake up again, and again, and still the same dream, no getting out.
Stifled under the weight of two gigantic breasts that are smothering me like the Christian nightmares of a lustful born-again who can't kick.
Stuck in this dream, terrifying, forever.
If I hadn't of ran I would be dead,
there still,
stuck,

no question.

Don't get stuck.