I AM AHAB: April 2008

“Chaos” is one of the most amusing storytellers I’ve ever encountered, a magical combination of completely crazy tales and maniacal animation that somehow manages to create shock simultaneous to a twinge of self-recognition. An amazing artist, self-described junkie, survivor and witness to more overdoses than you’d think could be contained in a single person, he is a man who most profoundly doesn’t give a fuck.

Chaos told me this story.

“Check this out:

“So, one time, me and my friend had some cocaine, and I was like, ‘Let’s sell this shit,’ so we went to Boulder and started trying to sell it. We were on the street for a while trying to unload this stuff, and we probably were looking crazy ‘cuz we were all spun up, but eventually my friend ran into some guy he knew that was into it, so we went to some apartment.

“There were these two guys at the apartment and me and my friend, and they called somebody on the phone who was supposed to show up with the money. So we were smoking up in the living room, and I had been doing so much cocaine that I would take these great big hits, and when I exhaled it would be like this great big fucking cloud, and it was going up into the ventilation system. And now this guy was like, ‘Dude, what are you doing? That shit’s not cool,’ and I was like, ‘Fuck it. That’s how I do it.’ And I don’t know what was going on, but something didn’t seem right, so I went to the bathroom for a minute, and I was looking at myself in the mirror like, ‘What the fuck is going on?’ And when I came out of the bathroom and started going back to the living room, my friend was there and he said something like, ‘They’re playing with your life,’ and I was like, ‘Fuck that shit. I live on the streets—I value my life.’”

The first time I had encountered Chaos was at Cell House Five. Part of the Territorial Correctional Facility in Cañon City, Cell House Five has become a stopover point for most of the people being moved around Colorado’s ever-growing prison system. With open bars, tiny cells, and group showers, Cell House Five is decidedly old-school. When I first got there, I wasn’t sure I would survive it; at least not with my sanity intact. I had seen Chaos around, and he talked to some of the same few people I talked to, but we never really conversed. One day, on the way to breakfast, seemingly out of the blue, he said, “You know who’s a good one? Kurt Vonnegut. He’s definitely got some good ones.” We had a brief conversation about some of Vonnegut’s work. It was one of the more random and interesting introductions I’ve experienced.

He continued: “So then I went back into the bathroom, and there were some towels hanging on the wall, so I lit them on fire. Now I’m letting the towels burn and the fire’s creeping up the wall and the smoke’s starting to get thick, so I took off my shirt and ran it under the sink and held it up to my mouth to breathe through.

“All of a sudden somebody starts pounding on the door, saying, ‘What the fuck are you doing in there?’ And now I’m braced against the door and they’re trying to bust the door open and they’ll push it open a little bit and I’ll get it closed again. One of these times it’s open I see this guy out there and he’s a great big guy, like a bodybuilder, and I’m like, ‘Oh, shit, it’s gonna go down now.’ So I step away from the door and crouch down so I can get as much oxygen as possible, and I wait.”

While in prison, Chaos replaced his usual proclivities with drawing, with weights, and with tattoos. The word “chaos” spread across the top of his chest in a slight arc; whether his moniker or that tattoo came first, I couldn’t say any more definitively than the question of nature versus nurture. He always seemed to be able to lift a lot of weight, though I suspect his habits on the streets didn’t include working out. Scars ran down the entire length of both his lower legs. a shot of heroin big enough to make him nod off for about twelve hours in a kneeling position had nearly cost him his legs. He was still in the wheelchair and not long out of the hospital when he was nodding out again.

“The guy comes crashing through the door and I grapple with him for a minute and he pushes me against a counter, and the whole place is filled with smoke, and now that the door’s open the fire really gets going. The guy tries to punch me, but I dodge it and he punches the mirror and I grab a piece of broken glass and cut his arm and he lets go of me. So I push him off me and the other two guys are screaming and I push past both of them and run out of the apartment complex.

“But now I figure they’re probably really out to get me, so I run into an apartment building right next door to hide out. And I’m just going from one door to another, seeing if it’s open. The first door that opens, I go in, close the door behind me, and go right into the closet, and I hear someone say, ‘Honey, what was that?’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, shit.’

“So now I’m hiding out in the closet for a while, and I can hear the sirens as the fire truck pulls up to the apartment complex next door, and after a few minutes I can’t stand it anymore so I run out of the closet and back out through the front door and the lady who was in the apartment starts screaming.

“Now I’m running through the apartment building again, trying doors again to find one that’s unlocked, and I find one and go in and close the door behind me. And there’s like five or six people in there and one of them holds up his hand and is like, ‘What’s going on, man?’ And I’m like, ‘These guys are trying to get me.’ This guy gets me to sit down and asks me if there’s anything they can do to help, and one of them gets me a glass of water. And I’m sitting there for a few minutes, I’m not wearing a shirt ‘cuz I dropped mine when I was scuffling with that big guy, and I’m all coked up and probably smell like smoke. Amazingly, I didn’t cut my hand on that piece of broken mirror, ‘cuz I picked it up with my shirt.

“Anyways, this chick in the apartment starts getting on the phone, and I’m thinking about how crazy I must look and that I just ran out of that other apartment, so I’m sure she’s calling the cops or something and I figure the police are probably looking for me anyway. So I get up and I’m like, ‘No that’s okay, I’m alright, I’ve gotta get going,’ and I go back out the door.

“I get back out into the parking lot and there’s all kinds of, like, fire engines and ambulances and cops out there, and I expect that I’m gonna see the dudes from that first apartment that are out to get me, or that the cops are gonna arrest me. So I walk across the parking lot and once I’m out of there I just take off running. I don’t even know how far I ran after that—I just kept running.

“After that, I was sure that the cops were gonna come get me, that there would be a warrant out for my arrest or something. So I kept looking in the newspaper every day after that, to see what the newspapers would say about it. But the newspapers never said anything about it.

“But check this out:

“One time after that, I ran into my friend from that day, and I didn’t know if he had been in on it, or what, so I had just been avoiding him. He was like, ‘I’m sorry about what happened that day,’ and I was just like, ‘Yeah, you’re fucking lucky, man.’ And after that, I just never hung out with that guy ever again.”

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