No Junk, No Soul

[satindesire]

Welcome to "No Junk, No Soul". I hope you enjoy reading, and perhaps even playing in it.

This thread is welcome to all paragraph-players, meaning there is a post limit. If you cannot post at least thee paragraphs of five or more sentences, then please do not play here. PM me for permission to join before posting.

This RP is ultimately, going to be played almost backwards. The RP will be conducted in a first-person journalistic rather than a novelistic way, it is about a young Japan-American artist who spirals ultimately, into suicide, after a bout of heroin addiction leaves her unable to paint, and the story of all of the people around her and how her art and life affected theirs.

I will be playing the part of the journalist assigned to do her story for the paper, and Jenny's sister Amy Chin.

Portrait of an Artist: the picture of Jenny Chin
http://bp0.blogger.com/_uD34C4c7o2A/RlMZPgcVL-I/AAAAAAAAAEk/_AezbQCT21o/s1600-h/26.jpg

******************************

My name is Frank Montana. I used to be a journalist for the San Fransisco Sun. I've been working in California almost constantly since after my internship landed me here, but if I had to pinpoint the one story that drew me in the most, it would be the Jenny Chin piece I did back in oh-three. Yeah. When I die, I know people will remember my name because of that story. If only because it was a story people like me drown in. She was the kind of girl that a man drowns in.

Before the ink could even dry on the pages it would suck you in. I almost lost myself in it, in her. No wonder she....Well. You know.

I heard about Jenny Chin when my girl told me she'd been invited to a gallery opening down in Chinatown. Said the girl was a regular Monet, a classical hand. She had an eye for the beautiful and profane...in a year when smearing shit on a virgin mary statue was pawned off as art, she was supposed to be some kind of genius.

I grumbled a bit, complained when she made me pluck my unibrow...and my dress slacks felt tighter this year then they had last. But I forgot all that the moment I walked into the place.

The paintings were...surreal. Maybe I should say, super-real. Fantastical. The solidity and quality of some of her work was so laden with breath and gravity and...soul...that the eyes that stared back at me seemed to pulse with blood and vitality. Some of them were so strange and frightening that I would remember them in my most horrific nightmares for years to come. Some of them were just...abstract and odd, but nonetheless carried so much emotion that you half expected the canvas to speak.

I was sipping a screwdriver when I saw her, out of the corner of my eye. I'm not a sucker for a pretty face, and hell...my girl wasn't exactly a dog if you know what I mean. But there was something about her...something...I dunno. Haunted. About her. A feeling, that sort of clung to her.

She was real small, almost childlike. Maybe 5' tall, boyishly skinny with dark hair she'd tied back in a messy knot at the back of her neck. She had big, piercing brown eyes. Sad eyes, like a puppy you'd kicked. I didn't know it then, but that was the end of my relationship and my job.

After the opening, she rocketed to fame. Multi-millionaires were clamoring for her pieces, celebrities were commissioning her for portraits and landscapes to fill up their penthouses and Gotham flats. She became a celebrity in her own right, the press hounded her constantly, paparazzi gave her no peace. It degenerated from respecting her work to wanting to see how far she'd fallen.

The day we got the news was the day I would start to watch my career slowly crumble into dust.

**********

Amy Chin, November 8th.

"She called me, crying. It had to have been four in the morning. She was hysterical, screaming, I could hear her throwing things, breaking things. She said the muse had left her."

"What do you think she meant by that?"

"I don't know. She had probably been on a binge for days. She was coming down, crashing, withdrawing...whatever they call it. It was impossible to talk to her. She was totally incoherent."

"That's when you left to go to her flat?"

"y-Yeah. I...I uh, l got there about five thirty. It was really foggy, you know the way it gets in the winter. The traffic and press made it almost impossible to get in."

"What did you see when you walked into her apartment?"

"Broken dishes. Half finished paintings. Old newspaper clippings, take out boxes, paint. It was a disaster. I thought maybe she'd gotten robbed."

"That's when you called the police."

"Yeah. I used my cell phone."

"There was no sign of your sister in the apartment?"

"No, not immediatly. I called out for her, but there was no answer. I got scared, thought that maybe she'd gotten kidnapped or something."

"And that's why you left."

"Yes. I took my cell phone out of my purse and went back into the hall. I thought it would be better if I didn't touch anything, just in case they...I don't know, dusted for fingerprints or something."

"So after you called the police, what happened?"

"I was sitting there in the hall when I noticed what sounded like water running. I went back into the apartment, and then into her bathroom. The shower was on."

"And that's where you found your sister."

"Yeah....she-....she was...in the shower. The water had gone cold. She must have....done it....right after we hung up the phone."

"You found her in the shower, and she was dead?"

"If I had left...right after. If I had gotten there sooner....

........Maybe she'd still be alive."

 

[Silkcrow]

No Junk, No Soul - Crow

My name is Tony Crosetti, though I answer mostly to Crow. My wop father called me Anthony, but my mother fixed early on what she said was my uncanny resemblance to her grandfather, a full-blooded Comanchee. He went by Crow, too. Saw a picture of him once. Maybe 6’2”, rangy, jet black hair to his shoulders, two parallel lines of ochre scars chiseled almost to the bone on both high cheeks, and a large skinning knife tucked into his braided belt. Yeah, I suppose I look like him, though I’m taller, my hair’s longer, and I prefer tats to ritual scars. None of the scars I have were self-inflicted. I’m a cop. Sixteen years now. Vice, narcotics, homicide. You name it.

I used to like my job. It gave me something I never had as a kid - grudging respect. Growing up a half-breed on the mean streets was no picnic. I never knew which half of me they hated most. My mother watched it all . . . the racist slurs, the closed doors, the beatings. She’d draw me close and chant stories of my ancestors as she wiped the blood from my nose or rubbed unguent on my bloody knuckles. I can still hear her voice, clear and soft, but full of incredible strength. She never let me carry a knife, and my God she was wise in that. She told me I could choose what to do with my anger. I used to think I made the right choice. Got my badge a week after I turned 21. That night I went to bed in the cheap flat I rented and there, under the blanket, was my great grandfather’s knife. I still don’t know how she got into my room.

Took me awhile to earn that grudging respect I mentioned. The streets were one thing, but the Department something entirely different. In the early days I’d get grief about my blood lines and long hair. Now, what with cops of every ethnicity, cops with beards, earrings, talismans, and even breasts, I hardly stand out anymore. I never gave a crap anyway. I had no illusions about the system. From day one I realized it was fraught with bigotry, incompetence, inequity and pettiness. Nothing new to me. I didn’t want to change it anymore than I wanted to play the game of suck up politics. I had better uses for my anger. Got my detective shield by hard work and straight play. And as much as the system sucked, eventually it would produce a file and set it on my desk. Because someone was dead. And it was my job to find the truth about it. And finding the truth in the midst of all the lies and deceit was the only thing that kept me sane.

Yeah, I used to like my job. Used to look forward to getting those files. Most had names. Some didn’t. Sometimes it was months before I could start to unravel the twisted circumstances that had fetched up the life of a John or Jane Doe in mid-sentence. For these friendless ones, about whom no one cared enough even to acknowledge their existence much less their demise, the only truth I could determine was that they had painted themselves into a bad corner. Choices. Everyone had choices. Even a life shipwrecked by a marathon of bad decisions continued to make choices. Sleep in the wrong alley. Talk to the wrong woman. Make too much noise. Try once to strip away your camouflage of anonymity and pretend you’re still a viable human being with a remnant of pride, and the exclamation point to your life may well be a tag on your toe and a thin file on my desk.

Yeah, I used to want to make some sense of it all for them. Used to look forward to the next file. Then one showed up on my desk with a name on it. I knew the name. Jenny Chin. I knew her. I was in love with her. Yeah, I used to like my job.

 

[Silkcrow]

No Junk, No Soul - Teulie

You can call me Teulie. Everyone else does. Well, everyone but Jenny. She never called anyone by his or her real name. She’d fill those almond eyes of hers with you, almost like she was sucking your essence into some litmus reservoir and, in a moment or two, speak a word and that’s who you were to her from then on. It could be anything . . . a noun, a verb an adjective, even a little musical sound she’d make with that tiny sparrow voice of hers. Whatever it was, though, it was uniquely yours. She would never call anyone else what she called you. I could never decide whether it was endearing or weird, so I just accepted it as a little of both.

Jenny called me Ivory. For a long time I thought it was just a cute way of summing me up physically. You know, willowy blonde with porcelain skin. I started to wonder, though, when I sat for her. It was to be a nude, and I had hoped she would engage that meticulously sensual style of hers to the brink of something prurient. Damn, I was so excited. I knew there would be the usual throng of people milling about her studio when I posed. It never bothered her. She was oblivious to any distractions when she had a brush in her hand. As for me, well, let’s just say my lascivious nature has served me well over the years.

I was prepared to pose for three or four hours and come back for a second session the following day. She was done in about twenty minutes. There was nothing on the white canvas except a thin black silhouette of me sitting on a backless bench, facing front, legs spread wide, left hand cradling a breast and right arm extended as if beckoning. It was anatomically perfect, yet too stark to be sensual. I was upset. She would never talk to me about it. She never explained her paintings other than to say simply “that's what I saw.”

I suppose it was predictable that we would never be close. She was all about finding chi and distilling it on canvas with color and texture. Me? I prefer to manipulate someone’s life force onto my plate and devour it whole, and the only colors that intrigue me are blue blood and the kind of green you can stuff into a wallet. Still, our needs kept us together. I needed access to the well-heeled patrons who could afford her work. And she needed the junk that opened the portal to her soul.

The last time I saw her, holding a silver spoon over a bright blue flame flame, she told me why she called me Ivory. “It’s not the color,” she said. “It’s the bone. Beautiful on the outside. Dead on the inside.” Strange last words from someone who's now dead all over.

 

[satindesire]

Crime Scene Investigation Report of findings from the apartment of one Jennifer L. Chin.

Investigator: Marcus Chow

Journal Entry #47

July 1,

I woke up with bloody eyes. I can't remember painting last night, just flashes, tastes, like the scent of something long forgotten stuck to the back of your tongue. I brushed my teeth til my gums were as raw and oozing as my eyes were but I could taste her in my mouth like her tongue was there, her fingers. Her long hair.

I can't remember painting again. Again. I'm scared, but...no matter how close I get to the edge I can only brush my fingers across the blade and feel the sharpness and that's all. Like something in my body's a tether, holding me back.

Keeping me from falling.

I have to cut the lines sometime. I can't be afraid of od'ing anymore. I know she's waiting for me, just waiting for me to be brave enough to take that last hit that will throw open all my walls so my soul can pour out onto the paper as pure and perfect as glass and light.

It's genuis on the other side. My muse, the reason I paint. The reason I have to paint. I feel the colors sometimes inside me rising like a wave, like a tidal wave that'll crash into my ribs and my skull and I'll shatter outward with blood and bones and peices of shining dark organs like paint splashing canvas on the ground. The gruesome last work of Jennifer Chin.

I can smell it, the breakthrough. The only time I don't remember painting is when I'm stoned, flying high above the world where the colors bleed out like a wet watercolor, vivid and soft and running together in a river that drowns out the noise of people and polluition. It's just me and paint and the distant beconing muse. I can taste her. Smell it, all my senses are reaching for it at once.




Journal Entry #62


Janruary 17,

The opening on New Years' Eve couldn't have been more perfect. I hear even the President came. Probably just a rumor. I don't remember, just...laughing, champange bubbles like gold sky in my head, filling me up so much I'm like helium floating away.

I saw little peices of it on the ten o'clock news but I can't remember...can't remember anything anymore, really. Halston left a voice mail on my cell phone but I don't know where his dress is. It was beautiful, too, red glimmering silk like stars were captured in the tiny separate pleats. It's not in my apartment. I don'tknow where I left it.

I'm getting thinner. I can't eat anymore, I'm scared that if I'm full there'll be no more room for her.

The edge is closer every time I use the needle.

 

[Silkcrow]

No Junk, No Soul . . . . Crow

Chow’s been tiptoeing around me like a kid trying hard to hide a bad report card from his father. I gave him the file a week ago. It was protocol, of course, seeing as how I knew her. But that’s not the reason I gave it to him. I had no intention of walking away. No. The force would have its investigation, and I would have mine. Chow would put the easy pieces together, but I would link up the hard ones.

I knew the picture those easy pieces would paint. Just another whacked out artist who couldn’t draw a straight line without the help of a needle pumping junk into her veins, thereby displacing so much of her soul that she ended up lifeless in a white porcelain tub full of cold water. Just another suicide in a city grown used to them. Yeah, right. Tough point to argue given the journals and the obvious physical evidence. Chow’s job was easy. But he didn’t know Jenny the way I did.

She never really hid it from me. How could she? Even an untrained eye would have seen the tracks on her arms and thighs. Of course she knew I knew, but we never talked about it, and never once did she use when we were together. I don’t think it was as much her fear of compromising me, a cop, as it was her way of being nothing else but herself with me. Just Jenny, unharnessed by her muse. She never let me watch her paint, except that once. She didn’t want me to see her that way. She wanted me to see her just the way she was the first night I met her.

It was one of her first openings; I can’t remember which, at a seedy gallery in the loft district. She had already created a buzz in the arts community and a decent turn out of blue bloods was expected. They needed security. I needed a hundred bucks. I stayed out of the way until the end of the evening when some drunk asshole in a $3,000 suit tried to manhandle Jenny into his limo. I only hurt him a little as I stuffed him into the back seat and cradled Jenny under my left arm. The Neanderthal driving for him, Russian I think, started for me, saying something like “if I don’t kick your ass I’ll lose my job.” I just grinned at him and said, “Better fired than dead, dickhead.” I got the plate number as they sped off. It’s America. He’d find another job.

Jenny was a mess, shaking like a defeathered sparrow. She clung to me like she might fall off a cliff if she let go. I drove her home, fed her some scotch from the flask I carry, and walked her to her door. She held her grip on me even as she reached for her key and pleaded with me not to leave. I didn’t. In a little while, she was painting me. With her fingers. I was her canvas and she covered me, head to toe, in a palette of blues, reds and yellows. Then she came to my arms and as our two canvasses of skin swirled and writhed together, colors melded and mutated, creating a visual tableau of how two disparate souls can forever change one another.

No, Chow didn’t know Jenny the way I did. No one did.

 

[satindesire]

Jenny's Answering Machine

Beep!

This is Jennifer. You know what to do.

Beep!

"Jenny. Please call me. PLEASE....god....just...call me."

Beep!

"Jenny, are you home? It's Andrea. Call me, goddammit! I'm scared."

Beep!

"Jennifer Lee Chin, if you don't call me back I swear to god I will find you and take you to rehab myself. I swear to god....J-Jenny....fucking....call me. Please."

Beep!

 

[Silkcrow]

Crow

I had to see her before the autopsy. I’m not fully sure why. Maybe somehow I thought I’d learn something that would help me piece it all together. Maybe I wanted to frame my anger in a single, indelible image. Maybe I just wanted to say goodbye.

Chow met me outside the city morgue. “You don’t have to do this,” he said. I just looked at him and pushed through the door. I knew the way. I’d been here a hundred times before. But as we stepped into the elevator to the basement, sounds, sights, smells, all the small details of this place I had always ignored, suddenly rushed at me. I didn’t want to notice these things, didn’t want any part of them, yet they assaulted me in tiny irresistible increments and stuck like fetid syrup.

As the elevator bounced to a stop, the compartment filled with a dense chemical odor that lacerated my nostrils even before the doors opened. I slumped against the back wall and shook my head to be rid of it, but I knew it was much too late. I was infused with it, and it would live there, ulcerate and metastasize until it blotted out every fragile memory I still clung to . . . jasmine perfume, crushed indigo and linseed oil, the musk of her sweat. . . . forever gone now beneath the cloy of death.

I let Chow lead now, down a short corridor and through two windowless swinging doors, then around a corner and into a small room. There was no furniture, equipment or instruments in the room. Just a hospital gurney. The gurney was covered with a long strip of disposable paper. Lying on top of the paper was a black vinyl bag, zippered lengthwise from one end to the other. Attached to one corner of the bag by a heavy clip was a white tag with some writing on it.

I moved closer to the gurney and looked down at the bag. At one end, just below the top of the zipper, a dozen or so strands of jet-black hair stuck up between the brass teeth. They glistened in the sterile light save for a few which were stuck together in a paste of crusted crimson paint. I recognized each one.

The tears came now, unbidden, unwanted. I tried to ignore them and refused to blink my eyes, which they quickly filled and fled in thick droplets onto the bag. I felt my throat close up, my heart pound like a fist against my chest, and cursed myself for coming. Through the blur I saw Chow reach for the zipper. I stopped him with a hand on his arm, still focused on those bedraggled strands of hair and the sound of tears hitting the vinyl.

”Choices, kid. Everyone makes choices. And I’ve just made a bad one.” Then I walked out.

 

[Silkcrow]

Teulie

Hell no, I don’t feel responsible. Christ, she was the one sticking the needle in her veins, not me. And why would I want her dead, anyway. She was the fucking goose that laid the golden egg. Talk about a meal ticket. I mean, she always had cash and plenty of it. None of that sniveling, begging, “oh, please … can’t you just this once… I’ll get you the money somehow” crap with her. No, she wasn’t your typical junkie, that’s for sure.

Shit, if anything I was looking out for her, especially towards the end. She kept asking for more and more. Hell, I was genuinely concerned for her. Even tried to convince her to cut back, that she was on a bad road. Of course, she didn’t listen. Couldn’t tell her anything, the bitch. No one could.

So I’d give it to her, just like she asked. Just like the good little dealer she’d helped me become. But I tried to protect her from herself. The more she bought, the more I cut it. Fact is, by the end she was using twice as much and getting maybe a little less purity than when she started. After all, what are friends for?

So don’t try to lay a fucking guilt trip on me. Maybe she wasn’t typical, but she was a junkie all the same. Even so, that damn Indian cop boyfriend of hers is creeping me out, always lurking around. For the life of me, I don’t get what she saw in him. Still, I have to think he knows who her source was.

Well, fuck him. Maybe I’ll worry about him later. Right now I’ve got to find a vault for Jenny’s portrait of me. No telling how much it’ll be worth someday, now that she’s dead.

 

[satindesire]

Forensic Post-Mortem examination report from pathologist Dr. LeAnn Rumsfield.

"The subject is an Asian female, Black hair and brown eyes, twenty five years of age, five feet two inches tall, weighing....eighty pounds. There is a small portwine birthmark three point six milimeters wide on the left ankle just below the achillies tendon and a two milimeter mole just above the right eyebrow. Upon examination of the epidermis of both the left and right forearms and thighs, premortem bruising and multiple injection site wounds as well as older scars are visible. Eighty three at first count, total. The epidermis was relatively free of debris as the body was discovered in the deceased's bathtub and had been in the water for several hours before discovery. Pale blonde human hairs were found in the water.

The subject was suffering from malnutrition, but the hair and nails of the subject are in very good condition, as is the rest of the unscarred skin. Both the left and right forearms look to be slashed by a knife or razor of some sort.

The heart and subsequent major arteries are shiny and in good condition. Both the left and right lungs are clear of fluids or detritus and are shiny and in good condition. The stomach is notably lacking in any signs of digested or undigested food matter, and the small intestine and stomach both are badly shrunken and show signs of internal ulcers... Probably due to prolonged malnutrition. The liver has some minor scarring, probably due to alcohol abuse. The blood alcohol level in the subject was point two-three, well over the legal limit. Further toxcicity screening shows high levels of heroine, codine, methadone and morphine as well as high levels of folic acid and iron. Prenatal vitamins were found in the deceased's personal effects.

The opinion of this medical examiner is that the victim died of severe traumatic blood loss due to the self inflicted wounds on both the left and right forearms. I am deeming this case a suicide.

Dr. LeAnne Rumsfield, case number 45433."