Lacrecia

By Tenzin McGrupp © 2004

I stabbed a woman once, in a bar in Berlin. She had a lisp, which often confused me when she spoke French and English. Her German for the most part was lisp-free. Odd, I thought, since Lacrecia was born just outside of Montreal, Canada. As the story goes, we met up with each other in Amsterdam. She was crashing on a houseboat with a group of Swedish hippies near the Red Light District and I knew her from my past travels in the Caribbean. I had lost most of my Euros playing cards at the Holland Casino and had begged her to loan me a few bucks to buy some hash. She agreed, but only if I drank an entire bottle of Absinthe with her. We settled into a side street cafe, one where we knew no tourists from Missouri with camcorders would stalk us, and began the process of drinking the bitter La Fée Verte.

It came on slow and I likened the buzz to tripping on mushrooms, but not quite. Lacrecia began licking her lips repeatedly and muttering in broken English and French, "I don't feel much of anything."

"Maybe you can't feel a thing because of the entire gram of cocaine you snorted in the toilet twenty minutes ago," I snapped at her.

She flashed a distasteful frown, a face that snarky junkies (like myself) find themselves trying to erase from their memories for the rest of their lives. She swigged the remainder of her glass and lit up a joint, mixed with Northern Lights and tobacco. That was the last thing I recalled about Holland. Three days later, I woke up in a small apartment in the posh Hackesche Höfe section of Berlin. I had a stomachache, my socks and my passport were missing, and it took me another day before I tracked down the wench who had attempted to sell my passport to a sophisticated ring of Chinese organ thieves. Luckily, I still had all my organs intact.

When I found her, she was drinking at a table of well-dressed bankers and a very large woman, who looked like Linda Tripp in a sun dress. With perfect English, she invited me to the table after I clumsily made my way through the crowded cafe shouting at Lacrecia like the deranged soul I had become. Before she could say anything, I picked up a fork and plunged the shiny piece of silverware into her upper left arm. She screamed and I searched my poor memory for a more satisfying moment. When I could not find one, I let go of the fork and watched the blood trickle down her bicep and forearm while a flurry of unknown German words were shouted my way.

Tenzin McGrupp is a writer from New York City.