American Junkie Read online

  [LATE 1982]

  I held the cigarette under my face and let the smoke trail up, directly into one of my eyes. Eventually I couldn’t bear it and I blinked, my eye filling with tears. I took a break for a second, then did it again, fighting to keep my eye open in order to get the maximum effect, make my eye as red as possible. I had the other symptoms memorized and ran over them again in my head; a dull aching pain behind my eyes, half of my face feeling stuffed up and then the other half. I let the smoke float up into my eye until I couldn’t take it anymore. My friend Josie watched me intently from the passenger seat.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “I’m going to get a shot,” I said, “Demerol.”

  “Why?”

  “No money,” I said.

  “Why do you have to do that stuff?” she asked.

  She just didn’t get it. Alcohol didn’t work anymore, never had really. I had drunk enough, but mostly only because everyone around me had been doing it. Mostly because there hadn’t been anything better. Demerol was better.

  At the admissions desk I told the nurse I had a migraine and described the symptoms. I said that my name was Arthur Lake, a skateboarder I remembered from the old days, and that I hadn’t been able to work or sleep for two days. Nodding occasionally, the receptionist took my information, then ushered me to a room. I grabbed a couple of magazines from the wall and climbed up onto the paper covered exam table. After about ten minutes, a doctor came in and before doing anything asked me if I was driving anywhere that night. I knew he was going to ask that, and I had that answer memorized as well, the same thing I’d told the admissions girl. No, I wasn’t driving, I was walking home and I lived at an address I’d memorized a couple blocks away. I went through the symptoms one more time and the doctor told me to pull down my pants. He prepared an injection of Demerol, and stuck it in the side of my ass.

  I walked out of emergency room and down the street into the darkness of the parking lot. I got in the car, drove down to Boren Avenue and got on Interstate Five going north. Just like the time before and the time before that, just as I crossed the apex of the ship canal bridge the Demerol hit, the feeling spreading, the weight lifting, evaporating. The waiting was over. It was even better than the Percodans and Percocets I’d begun taking whenever I could get my hands on them. Words simply couldn’t come close to describing the feeling, the actual physical sensation it gave, but it was what Demerol took away from me that was the kicker. Hate. Jealousy. Envy. Rage. For years now they had been growing inside me, like a tumor. I’d hidden it well, but it was beginning to overwhelm me.

  I envied other people. I envied their ability to see what they wanted to see, hear what they wanted to hear, feel what they wanted to feel. I envied their ability to make things happen, to know who they were and what they wanted from life, their inflated egos, their tunnel vision, their ability to be happy by being a consumer, and their ability to ignore what that consumption was doing to other parts of the world. I envied their ability to not see past their noses and remain ignorant of the horror and sadness that lay beyond and also those that could see into the distance and knew what was out there, yet somehow had the strength to block it out and remain self-absorbed. I was jealous of their ability to maintain relationships, their ability to ignore the fact that every day they were growing older, slowly dying, their ability to limit the number of things they cared about, to not be overwhelmed, to not be crushed when they failed, their ability to sit down and enjoy the simple things in life, like a walk on a sunny day, food. I envied that they had the necessary parts to create a story of their lives, and their ability to just disregard things that didn’t conform to it.

  And yet, at the same time I despised them. I wanted to be like them and at the same time I didn’t. It was as if there were two people, polar opposites, equally strong, fighting for my soul. It was tearing me apart.

  I saw the highway before me get blurry, the drug pumping through my veins, flowing through my heart, washing my sins away. I’d been baptised into a new religion, freed from my self-torment. I had chosen. Josie would later tell me that I nodded out and coasted to a stop in the middle of the freeway. She managed to rouse me and I got the car up to speed again, only to nod off again. It went on and on like that, getting the car up to speed, nodding out, stopping, and her bringing me round, over and over until we got to wherever it was we were going.

  [JULY 17, 1999]

  “Good morning.”

  It was Cindy. I sat up in bed, groggy, and she placed the small paper cup filled with pills on the TV table. I’d been fairly cooperative and they never stayed to watch me take the methadone. As soon as she left I took six tablets, swallowed them down, put the other three in my Altoids tin and turned on the TV. Davy Jones of The Monkees was trying to sell 60’s cd compilations for Time/Life. What a tragedy, I thought. Rock star reduced to corporate prostitute. I changed channels. Some kind of preacher was yelling in a ridiculous sing-song voice, waving his arms like a maniac. He wanted cash. I changed channels again. It was another commercial. Desperation reached out from the glowing box with invisible fingers. I changed channels again. Thank god for remote control.

  The only decent thing on was Pokémon. I’d been watching it every morning. There was no twisted ulterior motive behind Pokémon. It wasn’t trying to get me to buy something that I didn’t need or make something look like something it was not. I could understand Pikachu, the little yellow electric mouse whose vocabulary consisted of varying tones, volumes and inflections of one word, ‘Pikachu!’ or portions of that one word. ‘Chu, chu!’ Or if he really needed to communicate, he would shock someone with his electric tail. I wished I had an electric tail. There would be no misunderstanding me then.

  Nick had been on me for a couple of weeks now, urging me to try and stand up. He’d installed something called a Theraband on the bed, a stretchy thing that I’d been slipping my foot into and trying to push. I could barely manage. If I couldn’t even push a rubber band how was I supposed to stand up, it sounded way outside of the realm of possibility. But Nick wouldn’t let it go, every day he’d come to my room and stand there, arms crossed, coaching me to do leg lifts, push on the Theraband and pull myself up using the trapeze. My left leg was like a log, dead weight. It seemed almost as if it’d been removed from my body and then stuck back on crookedly, the muscles and tendons barely working. There wasn’t much I could do with it, sometimes with great effort I could raise it off the bed for a few seconds.

  “Hello.”

  It was a teenaged girl, one of the volunteers.

  “I’ve got your breakfast.”

  She set the tray down on the TV table, a little box of Frosted Flakes, a small carton of milk, and a cup of coffee.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  I hadn’t seen her before, she must have been new, one of the volunteers that brought meals up from the kitchen on the first floor, got you videos from the rec room, some were even available to talk with you, a service I’d never used. Most of them were fresh-faced high school kids who hadn’t seen shit. Sometimes they would see my scars, and tentatively ask me about what happened. Even if I spent all day telling them about it, there was no way they could even begin to comprehend. If even junkies wondered about my wounds, trying to explain it to these kids would be like trying to explain what life on Mars was like. They would have to find out for themselves, the vagaries that life had in store for them, the absurdity, the paradoxes. There’s no way to explain those things with words. They would have to live them.

  I woke up. It was later that morning, the light in the room had changed. A young woman was in the room. She had opened a little toolbox on the counter next to the TV. She had her back to me but I could see she was fiddling with what looked like a butterfly, a tiny needle with plastic wings attached to a tube. It was used to draw blood. She turned to face me. She was cute, pale, like a vampire, with black hair, eyeliner and bangs.

  “I’m a phlebotom
ist,” she said, moving closer.

  One small vein on my wrist had started to come back. It was just a tiny thing, a miniscule bump.

  “This one might work,” I said, holding up my wrist, pointing at it.

  She was pretty good, and found the vein with her tiny butterfly.

  “I’ve never seen you before,” I said, trying to start a conversation.

  “It’s not always the same person,” she replied sharply.

  I was going to say something charming, but clearly, she wasn’t interested in talking so I just watched as she filled a couple of glass tubes with my blood. When they were full she applied little stickers to the tubes and wrote on them, then placed them into a little plastic rack that had slots so the tubes of blood could be placed standing on end, like an old style milkman, when they delivered glass bottles of milk. She placed the rack into the toolbox, packed up the rest of her stuff and left without a word.

  The rest of the day I watched people out in the hall, walking back and forth, coming or going, somewhere. I could see a little bit of a door, the room across the hall from mine. I’d caught glimpses of the guy who stayed there. He was very thin, but I could tell he used to be good looking. Sometimes a friend came to visit him, and on those days he placed a hand-made Do Not Disturb sign on the door. They wouldn’t come out for hours.

  It was around six o’clock. My mom was in for a visit, and I was trying to find something to talk about. She was older and from a completely different world, and it had always proved difficult.

  “How is your car?” I asked.

  “Ohh, just fine.”

  It’d been the last time I’d seen her, about five years back. Her previous car had finally broken down for good and I offered to take her to get a new one, help her pay for it. I’d been trying to stay away, keep her out of the path of destruction, but if she’d gone to the car dealership by herself, she would have gotten ripped off, she was way too nice, way too trusting of people, always had been. The salesmen ignored us and sat around chatting up some cows that worked there, trying to be suave. When I asked for a test drive they looked at me like I was putting them out. Their eyes sure lit up when I got back, however, and pulled that wad of cash out of my pocket. Scum. Just because they’d been assholes I bargained with them for a half an hour, threatened to walk out and got them to drop the price from twelve grand to nine. I wouldn’t have bothered if they’d just showed some simple respect.

  “So, it’s running well?” I asked.

  “Yes. It’s a good car,” she said.

  Then she started talking about her neighbors, in the apartment building where she lived. She’d always been so concerned with what other people thought. It was something I’d never understood. She’d been caught up in appearances like everyone else, thinking if a person wore expensive clothes and had a nice house they were some kind of better person. It was a lie and I had a thing about lies, I’d always been obsessed with truth, not how things looked, or seemed. Underneath all that junk people did to make themselves look like something other than what they were human beings were all flesh and blood, germs and bacteria. A dressed up piece of crap is still a piece of crap.

  “And then the man down in apartment #4 did this, and this person did that...”

  I tuned out and when she paused waiting for me to respond I said ‘Mmm hmm,’ or ‘Yeah,’ or ‘Okay.’

  Some talk show was on, some psychic or something. It’d gotten her attention and she’d stopped talking about the neighbors.

  “I used to believe these people. I used to believe they could talk to dead people,” she said.

  “Umm hmm.”

  “I don’t think I believe it anymore.”

  “Oh, really,” I said, wanting to clue her in that it was all a bunch of crap, just about everything that came over that shit box, but I didn’t want to hurt her feelings.

  “No, it doesn’t say anywhere in the bible that we can talk to dead people.” What could I possibly say to that?

  [JULY 20, 1999]

  Any minute now Nick was going to come through that door. We’d originally planned this two days ago but I kept putting it off. He walked in and I went stiff.

  “Tom? Are you ready?”

  “Ummm...I don’t know.”

  “It’s okay. You can do it. Nothing will happen. I’ll make sure of it, there’ll be nurses there with you, to catch you.”

  “I don’t think I can do it,” I said.

  “Sure you can.”

  I was speechless, and suddenly terrified.

  “Come on now, you have to do it sometime. You don’t want to stay in that bed forever, do you?”

  Right then it didn’t sound all that bad. I wouldn’t have to go out into the world, that freaking horror show. I could stay here, where it was safe. Two nurses arrived, fairly big guys. Nick lowered the rail on the bed. I took a deep breath, rolled onto my stomach and edged my legs off the side of the bed. They slipped off and I hung there, feeling for the floor with my feet. I couldn’t touch, felt myself slipping and I panicked, clutching the bed sheets, trying to pull myself back up, reaching for the rail on the far side of the bed. Just when I felt I was going to fall off two strong hands grabbed me under my arms, lifted me up and back and set me down in the geri-chair. My feet banged on the footrests.

  Nick steered the chair out into the hall and parked it, facing the wall.

  “Okay. What we’re going to do is put the geri-chair in its upright position, and when you’re ready I want you to grab the handrail on the wall and try to stand up. Don’t worry about slipping, or falling, or letting go, or anything. The nurses will catch you, they’ll have their hands under your arms the entire time.”

  Nick put the chair upright and pushed it close enough to the wall that I could lean forward and grab the rail. I felt the blood draining into my legs and feet but it wasn’t near as severe as that first time. I used my feet to flip up the footrests of the chair and set them on the carpet.

  “Okay. Ready?” Nick asked.

  “I guess.”

  “You can do it,” he said, trying to encourage me.

  The handrail was like a 2 X 6, a plank, but I could get grip on it somewhat, with my thumb and forefinger. I felt the nurses’ hands under my arms. It made me feel a little safer. I took a deep breath and tried to pull myself up, but I couldn’t. Before I could say anything the nurses lifted me until I was standing, hunched over, then I felt them start to let go. I panicked and grabbed the rail tighter.

  My right leg started trembling, then jerking slightly, and then it went crazy, up and down rapidly like a sewing machine needle, like it had a mind of its own, trying to run away from the rest of me. I was frantically trying to hang on but the railing slipped from my fingers and I started to collapse. The nurses caught me and set me back down in the chair. The whole thing took about ten seconds.

  “See?” Nick said, “I knew you could do it.”

  [AUGUST 4, 1999]

  The floor seemed so far away. I had never noticed before, but now, looking down at the floor felt a bit like looking over the edge of a cliff. The nurses’ hands were under my arms, ready to catch me. I took a step forward with my right foot, moved the walker forward, planted it on the carpet and put some of my weight on my arms. I picked my left leg up off the ground and it swung forward. I set it down and put some weight on it. It hurt. Nick was behind me with the geri-chair.

  “I can’t do anymore!” I shouted.

  “Okay,” he said quickly, “just let go of the walker.” I pushed the walker away and the nurses took my weight. Nick drove the chair closer and the nurses pulled me back and set me down.

  “That was good,” Nick said, “tomorrow we’ll try for two steps.”

  “Okay,” I said, using my feet to push the footrests down so I could set my feet on them.

  “Pretty soon you’re going to be walking up and down these halls.”

  I wasn’t so sure. I could stand, hanging on to
the rail for about thirty seconds, maybe a minute, but anything more than that seemed impossible. I couldn’t envision it, and I knew that I would need to if I were to make it happen. If you don’t think something can happen chances are it won’t and I simply couldn’t picture myself walking up and down these halls, not yet anyway. I’d felt weak and fragile before, but never anything like this. But I was making progress, I suppose, if you could call it that. I’d taken a step. One step. I’d moved my body from one place to another. For most people it wasn’t a big deal, they did it without thinking. They walked from place to place and sometimes they knew where they were going.

  But where was I going?

  If I could walk again, where would I go? If I got out of here and walked straight to the dope house, what would be the point? Could I somehow keep myself from doing that? I would have to find a reason not to.

  [AUGUST 21, 1999]

  “Keep going,” Nick said, walking backwards in front of me, urging me on. I could barely feel the nurses’ hands under my arms. I took a step, put my weight on my right leg, lifted the walker and swung it forward and my left leg followed. I’d taken about fifteen steps, made it from my bed out into the hall and was now on my way back. My mom was standing off to the side, watching. I managed to make it back to the bed and only required a little help getting back in.

  “He’s doing well,” Nick said to her.