If you’ve never built a LEGO helicopter while on cocaine, this story will give you the exact same experience… (2,300 words)
___________
To Build a Helicopter
She’s in the back bedroom, laughing. Maybe she thinks her voice won’t travel past the kitchen and into the living room, or maybe she doesn’t care what I can hear. Knowing what I know about her, it’s the second one.
I’m at the circular table in the living room with a gram of coke and a LEGO Technical Helicopter Limited Edition set. One thousand and fifty-six pieces, ages ten to sixteen. The pieces are mostly green and yellow. The table is bloody-brown and varnished to a slick shine. The cocaine is white. I am mostly red.
My foot taps one hundred and ten times per minute as I dump the LEGO pieces across the table. They skitter and tumble outward as bits of flotsam in a brown sea.
She laughs again, this time loud enough for me to know it’s deliberate. She’s thirty-four steps from me, through the kitchen, behind the closed door of my friend Matt’s bedroom. She’s in there with him and his friend Chase, who has a small waist and big biceps. I only met Chase tonight, and he flirted with her in plain view of everyone, as if I didn’t exist.
I never used to fret about that, because men have often flirted with her. No big deal.
She knew then what was coming, but I didn’t. She flirted back with Chase. I asked her to step into the bathroom so we could talk about her pattern of disrespect, but she refused. Since she was being so damn pig-headed, we had the conversation right there in front of everyone.
You have no ambition. You’re just floating through life, never accomplishing anything.
The thirteen other people at the party shifted in their seats, averted their eyes, pretended their phones needed attention. I didn’t care how they felt.
Everyone has now left except for her, Matt, Chase, and me. They’re all in Matt’s bedroom, thirty-four steps across the apartment. They’re laughing, having a good time, listening to music and having muffled conversations about whatever. I’m out here with the coke and one thousand and fifty-six pieces of plastic I intend to transform into a helicopter.
I tilt the baggie of cocaine over the table and dump out a pile the size of a dime. I pick up a long LEGO piece—probably one of the copter blades—and sweep it across the coke to mold it into a line. Then crosswise, then back straight, each time making the line more slender and uniform. Some of the coke will slip into the little grooves of the imperfect table, but that’s okay. It’s an easy clean-up job.
I slip my wallet from my back pocket and fish through the money to find a clean bill to roll. Mixed in with the bills is a receipt from the restaurant where we ate on our first date. Stupid, sentimental me, keeping such a useless thing after all this time. I crumple it and pitch it toward the trashcan, but it ricochets off the side and lands in the kitchen. I’ve always sucked at basketball.
I settle on a fiver I got back as change from the movie we saw last week, and place it on the table to roll it into a tube. The bill is crisp and smells only like money, not like the months or years of grime and fecal matter that old bills attract.
You have to have certain standards.
I insert the makeshift straw into my nose and place the other end just below the line of coke. With a rip, I snort it all, tossing my head back. No idea why I toss my head, it’s just part of the experience. There’s a lump at the back of my throat as the coke slips from my nasal passages, and that sweetly-chemical burn of the substance absorbing into my mucus membranes.
I snort the air again to force anything lingering down, and then I start to feel the numbness in my throat and nose. The air smells frosty, like inhaling menthol or taking the first breath when stepping out into a cold night. My throat constricts, and it’s hard to swallow. A finger across the table collects the bits of coke not pulled through the bill, and I rub my finger across my upper gums. Conservation as a virtue, and all that.
The LEGO job. Time to get back to it. I extend my arms across the table and pull all the pieces towards me, piling them in the center. So many pieces, they clink and clatter like poker chips across a felt table. I don’t even know where to begin, and there are no instructions in the box.
So let’s start with the blades. That’s easy enough. There are two of them, and they obviously snap together in the middle to form a cross. I’ll work my way down from there.
The bedroom door opens and someone appears. I look up to see Matt strolling through the kitchen, his long hair swishing from side to side. Through the open door, I see her reclining on the bed, and Chase sitting in a chair next to the bed, his legs straight and resting next to her body. Without looking, he places a hand on the door and flips it closed.
The refrigerator door opens and shuts. Matt walks into the living room and pulls up a chair at my table, but when he sits, he spins it around so the back is facing me. It’s like how the cool kids sat in chairs in 90s sitcoms. Of these, Blossom was my favorite, and her hip older brother who was a recovering drug addict and worked as a nurse or an EMT or something would sit in chairs that way. He was so cool he didn’t need to adhere to the society’s conventions of normal chair-sitting.
“What’s going on, dude?” Matt says as he sets a can of beer on the table.
I don’t look at him. I’ve got the blades put together, and if I lose my focus, I don’t know how long it will take to get it back. “I’m building a helicopter.”
Hiss-chick. Little bubbles of carbonation from his beer burst in the open air. He sips. “I can see that. I actually bought that LEGO set for my nephew, but… whatever, it’s cool.”
I can feel the coke coming alive in my body. I’m warm, and there’s more blood pumping across me. Faster blood, going more places and doing more things. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
He places his hands around the can and pushes it forward a few inches, leaning across the table. “It’s all good. I just wanted to check and see if you’re okay. I’m kinda surprised you stuck around.”
The blades must connect to some kind of cylindrical piece, or otherwise, they won’t turn. I flick through the pile to find something that will fit. “Should I leave? Am I not welcome here anymore?”
He’s drunk, eyelids barely open. “Shit, it’s not like that. You’re my bud, of course you’re welcome here. I’m just surprised, that’s all.”
“What is she still doing here?”
He sits upright and drains the can. “Look, this is crazy-awkward. I get it. You’re my friend, she’s my friend. I don’t really know how to proceed with all this shit, know what I mean? I’ve never seen that happen in public before.”
“What do the blades connect to?”
He flashes a lopsided grin. “The what?”
“The helicopter blades. What am I supposed to connect them to? Is there a cylinder piece in here somewhere, like some kind of… what do you call it? Rotor? Is that the right word?”
“I have no idea, dude.”
“Then what good are you?”
The words slip out of the side of my mouth, and the hurt immediately registers on his face. I wish I hadn’t said it, but it happened. Can’t take it back once it’s out in the world.
He stands up. “I’ll let you have some time alone.”
I want to apologize, but I can’t. I know all words to say, but not the right order to put them in.
Matt walks back to his bedroom, and his hair wiggles as he shakes his head. I don’t blame him. I try to sneak a peek into the bedroom, but he cracks the door only wide enough to slip inside before shutting it.
Back to the helicopter. Again, I look at the box, and can see how the blades attach to a series of pieces, not a single cylinder. Makes total sense.
I sift through the pieces to find the ones that will make the boxy-contraption that becomes the blade attachment. Making progress.
I snort back again, feeling a little bit of the coke still lingering in my nasal cavity.
Heart pushing blood. Legs pumping up and down. I wish there was some music playing out here, but Matt turned the main stereo off once the party fizzled. He listens to nothing but Frank Zappa anyway, since he has over a hundred of his albums on vinyl. Some of that experimental shit freaks me out.
Another look at the box. One thousand and fifty-six pieces. So many pieces, how can I ever find a home for them all? Seems like it would take hours of configuration, trial and error, and experimentation to use every one. It’s too much.
I toss the useless box aside. I will make the helicopter my own way, thank you very much, LEGO corporation.
I need a base; those pipe-like things that touch the ground when a helicopter lands. Two long black LEGO pieces emerge from the pile and seem to do the trick. Then, they’ll have to connect to the main body of the helicopter, so I find four angled pieces that can act as a bridge, one at each end of both base pieces.
Another laugh from behind the closed door sends a ripple through my concentration. I close my eyes and picture choppers swooping above a green field outside of Da Nang, rippling trees and grass like waves on the ocean. I will finish this damn project.
There’s a flat, wide piece to make the base of the main part of the helicopter. The floor. I connect the feet-thingies to it then build up the sides. Takes several seconds of noisy sifting through the mound of plastic to find four chairs to fit onto the floor of my helicopter, but I eventually find them.
The theme song for Blossom skips along in my head. So relentlessly happy and self-actualized.
With the chairs in place, I can see the structure taking shape. Not quite a helicopter yet, but it’s no longer a pile of cheap male and female plastic parts. It’s greater than that and becoming its own thing.
I close the top of the copter with some curved pieces and the hardest part is stirring the remaining pile to find the clear plastic windshield. There’s a sea of square pieces, long skinny pieces, rectangulars, flats, blocks. I just need the damn windshield! Why is that so hard?
Stirring, stirring, stirring.
There it is. Underneath another wide and flat piece, which I guess is supposed to be maybe attached to the other base? I don’t know. I’m almost done here and the pile seems nearly as big as when I started. Helicopter looks fine to me, though. I have no idea why the box insists all one thousand and fifty-six pieces are necessary.
Windshield goes on. Blade component snaps into place on top. The blades even spin, how about that? By my estimation, it’s a fine piece of work. Only two hundred and seventeen pieces used.
I sit back, and dump a little pile of the coke onto the crook between my thumb and index finger. Rip. Such a sweet burn going down the back of my throat. The numbness, so welcome.
She yelps from the bedroom, the way she used to do when I would tickle her.
I stand up and slip the baggie into my pocket, then lift the helicopter. Together, we walk across the living room and through the dark kitchen towards the bedroom. Light spills from underneath the crack. It’s thirty-four regular steps to the door, but we make the journey in twenty-seven.
Knock. Conversations hush.
I open the door, and there’s Matt standing in the back corner of the room, flipping through a stack of records on a shelf. Some bizarre and frenetic xylophone music whines from the speakers next to him. Chase is still in the chair next to the bed, and she’s on the bed, reclining and smoking a joint. She knows I hate it when she smokes pot. She always morphs into an air-headed moron, laughing at everything.
Everyone stops what they’re doing and stares at me.
“Hey,” she says, exhaling a plume of smoke. “I didn’t know you were still here.”
And that’s a lie.
“What’ve you got there?” she says.
I flick the helicopter blades with a finger, sending them around a few revolutions. “I made this.”
Chase laughs. “That’s what you’ve been doing out there for the last hour?”
My heart rumbles like a motorcycle engine. “It took me as long as it took to make it, and now I’m done.”
The three of them all share a look, but I don’t care. I walk the copter over to the bed and set it next to her knee. The words bubble up from the pit of my stomach. “You’re wrong about me.”
I spin the blades one more time, then turn and leave the room. I snatch my keys from the designated driver bowl, and let Blossom play me out of the apartment.
* * *
Discussion Questions:
1. Should he have used all one thousand and fifty six pieces?
2. Is sitting backward in chairs cool, or is it for posers?
3. Why is Frank Zappa’s music so freaky? It’s like an opium nightmare, right? Or is that just me?