American Junkie Page 14

  Later that day they gave me my meds, a three-day time-release Clonidine patch. It was supposed to lower a person’s blood pressure, help with heroin withdrawal, but by the first night the withdrawals got fierce. Kicking heroin had become something completely different from the simple aches and pains it once was. I was alternately sweating and freezing, shivering regardless of which. My mind was spinning and felt like it was going to implode. I couldn’t get comfortable, no matter what I did. I began to get the trademark ache in my joints, especially my knees, not somewhere on the surface but somewhere deep, inaccessible, planted in the very center of my bones.

  I began biting my forearm so I could feel something other than the ache in my elbows. I laid my arm out onto the bed, and pounded on it as hard as I could. I tried to rest, contorted into ridiculous positions, my arms and legs bent all out of whack so that the pain of stressing my joints toward breaking would distract from the ache. I’d never seen a clock move so slowly. I tried sleeping in a half-completed somersault, my back up against the wall and my legs in a sort of extreme lotus position. I tried banging my head on the silver painted steel pipe of the bed frame. I tried banging my head on the wall. After a minute the pain would return worse than before. This went on for hours. Finally, I peeled the Clonidine patch off my shoulder, put it in my mouth, and chewed it up until I passed out from lack of blood pressure. The next morning they kicked me out.

  [SEPTEMBER 4, 1999]

  “Because of the destruction of your left hip you may never walk again.”

  It was Dr. Miller, the doctor supervising my case. He only came around once a month or so, but he was the one who knew the details of what was going on with me, and who was in charge of ordering procedures. He went on to explain the details about my hip, which I’d heard before but for some reason wanted to hear again.

  “An infection has melted down the left socket of your pelvic girdle, and the top of your thigh bone,” he said, glancing down at a chart. I told him about using the walker.

  “Well, that’s good,” he said, pausing, “but we still don’t know what’s going to happen. Maybe your body will adjust to it, and you’ll have some mobility, but it could continue to deteriorate to the point where that would become impossible.”

  “Why didn’t they chop my leg off?” I asked.

  He thought for a second, tapping his lower lip with his finger, “I don’t know, it’s so damaged that it seems, to me, that it should have happened. It’s probably what I would have done. It’s pretty amazing, that you’re able to even stand on it, bear weight,” he said.

  Was I lucky? What had stopped me? One more day and I might have lost it, might be laying here dead, laying here with one leg. Why had I kept that phone glued to my ear? I was fairly certain that picking up the phone all those days had been some kind of survival instinct, but what had made me keep from hanging up that last day?

  “Tom?”

  It was that mental health counselor again.

  “Can we talk?” he asked. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. Talk was useless, talk was cheap. I needed someone to tell me how to take an action in life and make it mean something, preferably something a little less violent than shooting up a post office.

  “Have you thought about the anti-depressants?”

  “No.”

  They assumed that every person who used drugs was troubled, unhappy, depressed. And while it was true I felt that way sometimes, who didn’t? It was normal. This country had become an increasingly depressing place in my lifetime, the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. The continuation of this trend had contributed to my despair, which in turn had contributed to my addiction.

  But still, most drug addicts don’t use to the extent I had. The ones that used like I did were either locked up or dead. What was it exactly that separated me from any other drug addict? Many addicts had their flings with drugs, their little dabbles with death, their vacations from reality, a year, two, ten, but then they went to treatment ten times or got god or AA and stopped and went back to their lives, they went back to what they had before, back to themselves, back to their families, back to living before any serious damage was inflicted, before they had any scars. They had gotten close to the flame, stuck their hands in for a second, and then gone running away like little girls. I had dove headlong into the fire and stayed there until it burnt my flesh off. Not because I’d been some kind of tough guy, I had stayed long after the drugs stopped working, long after I stopped getting high, long after my body started falling apart simply because there was nothing to go back to. No, I wasn’t insane. If anything, I was too sane.

  [1984]

  Roxanne finished weighing up my piece, got up from the kitchen table. She walked over and straddled the arm of the dirty couch.

  “Here ya go baby,” she said in her smoky voice. I’d known her since the early days of the punk scene. Like a few others, she’d gone into selling heroin to maintain her habit. I handed her some money and she handed me the heroin. Once it was in my hand the weird tension in my gut went up a notch. My spoon and rig were already laid out on the coffee table, next to a glass of water. I cooked up the dope, laid the tip of the needle down on the cotton and pulled back the plunger, then held the syringe up in front of my face and tapped it lightly with my fingernail. The air bubbles rose to the top, merged and became one. A thought bubble with nothing inside.

  Some people are good with chopsticks. I was good at shooting up with one hand. I pulled the syringe out of my arm, and sat back on the couch. Any second now. It was coming. There. The waiting was over. My eyelids got heavy and I felt warm and relaxed, yet at the same time alive and strong. It was sunny outside, the light streaming in through the windows. Somehow I hadn’t noticed before. I wanted to go out and walk around in it, soak it up. Maybe go the few blocks down to Lake Union and sit there, stare at the water.

  It was what I’d been doing lately after getting high, strolling around wherever I was, enjoying the rain or the sun or the clouds. I sat back on the couch. My chest was expanding and contracting in a strangely pleasurable way. I lit up a cigarette and took a drag. I’d never had a better smoke in my life.

  Some voices roused me from my nod. Roxanne was over by the door talking to a tall, thin black girl. I’d seen her before, at shows, parties, we’d made eye contact, flirted a little, from a distance. Her name was Jenna and she was from the Eastside or something, a model I think. She looked like one, super thin, wearing a slinky dress with spaghetti straps and high heels. She sat down at the other end of the tattered couch and crossed her long legs. She looked at me and smiled. It was a good try, but something was holding her back.

  She bought some heroin and fixed on the coffee table. Her long limbs moved, sure and graceful. She had done this before. I watched her sink the needle into the dark brown skin of her arm. Smoke drifted up from an ashtray on the table. After, she fell back into the couch and took slow deep breaths, just as I had, then turned to me and smiled again. Her face had suddenly become even lovelier than before, freed from something. At that moment I knew that something was going to happen, and I got up from the couch and walked toward the door.

  Silently, we wandered around the apartment building. It had been cobbled together from a couple of houses and a space above a pub and it was like a maze, the hallways all different, some short and wide, some long and narrow. Some were dark, some lit by electric lamps with flame shaped light bulbs. Eventually we found ourselves at a beat up door without a lock, and no numbers or letters. Behind it a flight of stairs led up. At the top was a large attic that ran the entire length of the building. Thin shards of light seeped in from windows covered with bent up blinds at each end. A layer of dust coated the hardwood floor. I found a small lamp on a night table and switched it on. A couple of easy chairs and a loveseat were arranged in a semi-circle in the center of the room. Old dress suits in plastic bags hung on a rolling clothes rack against one wall.

  I sat down in one of the ea
sy chairs. She sat in the love seat. We looked at each other. I was there. She was there. That was all there was. It wasn’t the strange workings of our minds or the poisonous desires of our hearts that had brought us there, it was something else. Her eyes never left mine as she began removing her clothes. I did the same. I slid out of the easy chair to the floor and crawled over to her.

  It started slowly, gently. Occasionally we would stop and stare into each others eyes as if we were trying to stop time, freeze the moment and burn it into our memories. Then it would begin again, smiling at each other, occasionally laughing. It went on for a while like that, sometimes soft, sometimes hard, and then, it was over. I’d hoped that there would be something left, a spark, something we could use to build a fire, something we could share to keep ourselves warm, but there was nothing. We’d spent each other on each other, everything we had left, we’d played till our pockets were empty, but love for us was a broken slot machine that would never pay off. What we shared was wonderful, but it would not go anywhere beyond the here and now. We got dressed in a strangely comfortable silence. At the top of the stairs she paused for a second and looked back at me. There was a hint of sadness in her eyes. I don’t know if it showed, but I was feeling it too.

  [1986]

  I was utterly exhausted but I dragged myself down the street, like someone was behind me with a whip. If I could just make it to Nikko Garden, I thought, everything would be okay. Occasionally a wisp of wind would get under my collar and down my shirt, make me shiver and give me goose-bumps. My nose was running, my eyes were watering and I had a bad taste in my mouth. I looked at a billboard, advertising a TV show. If only I could fool myself, I thought, trick my brain into thinking I was just a regular person caught up in gossip and celebrities, if only I could be happy with a ten blade razor and fifty different flavors of ice cream, then maybe I could forget about this feeling that was putting my brain on the rack and stretching it until the pain reached every cell in my body. As usual, it only worked for what seemed like a few minutes, then I was back to feeling like a POW on a death march. The sun had just dropped behind the buildings on the other side of the street and it felt like the temperature had gone down fifty degrees. I walked past some ageing hippie, sitting on the sidewalk strumming on a guitar and it almost made me throw up.

  A few months before, my biological mother had contacted me, and invited me to an art party at some gallery in Pioneer Square. I hadn’t been seeing much of her the last few years, but occasionally she called or wrote.

  Some friend of Jack’s named Wilson had put it together. He was the executor of Jack’s estate and he was giving away some of his paintings to area hospitals. I didn’t have anything better to do so I went. It was just like every other upper crust art party I’d ever been to, a bunch of pretentious flakes sipping wine and talking crap. There were lots of older fags and other assorted high society art types that looked like they had money, walking around with their noses in the air. Friends of Jack’s came over and eyed me, up and down, scrutinizing me, sometimes leaning down, saying hello and shaking my hand.

  Wilson had been prancing around the room waving his arms, doing the whole limp-wristed thing, flitting back and forth between groups of people, babbling his fool head off like he was drunker than he probably was. I’d been waiting for the right moment to talk to him. It took a while, he seemed like one of those people who are talking non-stop twenty-four hours a day, but finally I cornered him by the bar when he was refilling a drink. After a few pleasantries I got down to business.

  “Can you tell me something about Jack?” I asked. I wasn’t sure he was really my father, and there was no way to find out, but I was curious about this man. My mother had been very selective about what she told me about him, and as his executor, I figured Wilson would be the person in the know. He paused and took a sip of his drink. He giggled and tried to escape. I subtly moved from side to side to keep him from getting away. I was determined.

  “The story I get from my mother, and the story from the newspaper, are two different stories,” I said. Wilson seemed reluctant.

  “Come on.” I said, “the prostitute, the hunchback, the getting thrown out of that guy’s house.”

  He stood there, looking up at me.

  “Look, I don’t care if it’s good or bad, I just wanna know,” I said. Wilson was clearly uncomfortable, and told me about what a brilliant painter Jack was, then tried to go off on some other tangent.

  “I know all that,” I said, “tell me something I don’t know.”

  He stood there, fidgeting.

  “Tell me something crazy,” I said, encouraging him to give me something, anything, a crumb.

  Finally, he relented and began talking.

  “Well,” he said, “you have to understand. Back then there was a lot of drinking going on, a lot of...sleeping around.”

  I was unimpressed and looked at him, wanting more.

  “Well, there was one time,” he said, then he hesitated..., “a birthday party, for Jack. Someone had brought an expensive cake and Jack climbed onto the table and put out the candles by pissing on them.”

  Wilson giggled again, half-heartedly. I got the feeling he was just trying to placate me, with the tamest story he could. He squeezed past me and pranced back to the party. Who was this man? What kind of man has friends who say ‘He did things that shouldn’t even be talked about?’ And then I remembered, and I froze.

  I didn’t have to ask anyone what kind of person Jack Stangle was anymore. The artistic tendencies, the anti-social behavior. He had pissed off every gallery owner in town and I had pissed off every club owner. He had urinated on a birthday cake and I had urinated on the marble floor of the State Capitol. This is what people meant when they said like father like son, or the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, or blood is thicker than water. Those sayings hadn’t been made up for nothing. Someone was talking to me. Somehow I’d made it back to the table and was sitting with my mother. A man was standing there, looking down. “You look so much like Jack,” he said. It was some old guy, one of Jack’s friends, apparently. I managed a half-hearted smile.

  “Yes, he does, doesn’t he?” my mother said.

  Nikko Garden was just around the corner. The closer I got to the bar, the worse I felt. This was what almost every day of the past couple of years had been like, and I was sick of it. I was sick of the hustle, sick of myself. I was sick of the whispered promises I’d been hearing my entire life, and my inability to do anything about them. More often than not I felt extremely old and tired, sometimes out on the street I would suddenly have to sit down, as if the gravity of the earth were too much and it would pull me down, suck me through the cracks in the sidewalk and into the earth, never to be seen again. I wasn’t really living anywhere, sometimes I crashed on people’s floors, sometimes I walked around the city all night like a mindless zombie. My latest scam was taking band posters off phone poles and cutting them up into little squares with a paper perforator I had stolen from the UW bookstore and selling them as acid to dumb kids from the suburbs who came down to The Ave at night. If I was on Capitol Hill I wandered the streets hoping to run into some desperate person who wanted drugs, so I could work a deal and get a cut. If I had come across horny fags I probably would have sucked them off. I prowled around outside the Olive Street Tavern, a bar where dealers hung out, like a starving dog sniffing around for scraps. When I did have money, I would buy equal amounts of heroin and coke and go to the bathroom of The B&O Café just up the street. I wouldn’t come out for an hour.

  I was about a block from the bar, and there was Gisele, on the sidewalk, walking toward me. Not long after we’d split up, she’d gotten bored with her new sugar daddy and started calling me up. We would hang out and get high with his money. He had eventually discovered her using and hanging out with me, made her go to treatment and when that didn’t take he’d thrown her out. It had dried up both our drug supplies and we’d both gone to AA meetings to
try and get clean. That was the last time I’d seen her.

  She had dark circles around her eyes and her jeans were dirty. She had always been model thin, but now she didn’t look so good.

  “Hey,” I said, “look who it is.”

  “Hi Tommy,” she said, looking slightly run down, but making an attempt to be happy to see me. “What’re you doing?” she asked.

  “I’m on my way to cop,” I said. She perked up a little more.

  “I can help you. I’m dealing now. The stuff is really good,” she said. Of course it was.

  She stepped into a doorway, shoved her hand down her jeans and pulled some balloons of heroin out of her pussy and gave me one. It was covered with some white stuff, yeast or something.

  “I gotta get well,” I said, “but stick around, I wanna talk to you.”

  I found a bathroom and shot up. The stuff wasn’t as good as she made out but it did the trick. After, we walked a couple blocks to the little park by The Apple Theater and sat down on a bench. The heroin made me feel better, but I knew I would need more before the night was done. Not long before, this much heroin would have been enough for an entire day. For the moment however, I was okay. Gisele seemed skittish, and her good looks were going, and with it, that confidence she’d always had.