American Junkie Page 15

  “What happened to....uhhh... that guy you married? That AA idiot?” I asked.

  She managed a little bit of a coy smile, like the whole thing had been a game. She’d always been good at seducing men with her coy-ness, it was second nature for her.

  “Ohh, him. Right after we got married he locked me up in his apartment.”

  I wasn’t surprised.

  “I told you that guy was a piece of shit.”

  “Yeah,” she said, pausing, lifting her eyes to look at me, “you did, didn’t you?,” chuckling slightly. She’d known too, she was too smart to not have.

  I’d despised the guy the minute I’d seen him. Somehow, he’d been able to stay clean for some years and had developed the persona of an AA guru, some kind of prophet. In reality, he was a wanna-be biker and a window washer. He would talk at every damned meeting, spouting his crap for twenty minutes or more, yelling to attract attention and cleverly insinuating that he held some kind of secret to staying sober. He would shout things like ‘If you don’t drink, you don’t get drunk!” No kidding. But people followed him around like stupid puppies. His shtick was clearly designed as a way of picking up girls that probably wouldn’t have had any luck in the real world, but there all the newcomers, spun out like they were coming off of whatever drug and thinking they’d had some kind of spiritual experience, fell under his spell. Needless to say, I didn’t last long in AA.

  “So? What happened?” I asked.

  “Well, he did some horrible things to me.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “Uhhh...oh, you know....

  Clearly she didn’t want to talk about it so I didn’t press her. I could imagine.

  “How did you get away?” I asked.

  “Oh, my dad had to pay him ten grand to get him to let me go and get the marriage annulled,” she said.

  That didn’t surprise me either. She was daddy’s little girl and he would always bail her out.

  Suddenly everything made sense, again. When we first got together I’d wondered why she’d gone out with me but now I knew. She was as broken as I was, and always had been. When we were together she told me the stories, when she was twelve, her dad’s friends at the dinner table, leering, putting their hands on her knee, the boys in school, drooling. When she was seventeen and still in high school she had a two-year affair with a married man in his 30’s, some law professor at the UW. Like most beautiful girls, she’d been treated first and foremost as an object of desire for so long that she didn’t know any other way. It had been going on all throughout her formative years and naturally she’d been formed into operating that way. It was the way things were. Sex sells, and as long as our society was based on selling garbage it would go on, even if they were essentially pimping out their daughters. Expecting beautiful girls to not use their looks to make things happen in their lives was just unrealistic. A pipe dream. Some sections of society complained about it, the objectification of women, but it was just talk, to do anything about it would require a revolution, a different culture, and the people who ran things just weren’t going to let that happen. Too much money was rolling in.

  Gisele and I sat there for another half hour and eventually ran out of things to talk about. It was slightly sad. We’d given it a shot, tried to make our love mean something, but neither of us had been strong enough to escape our pasts, or the current state of our society, even together. There was nothing more to say. After that night, I wouldn’t see her for quite a long time.

  PART THREE

  ENDGAME

  [1988]

  I reached in through the hole in the dashboard and made sure the heroin was in its usual place, a small round recess on top of the ashtray. The container, a round Bubble Tape chewing gum box, fit perfectly. Anyone sticking a hand in there would not be able to feel it. It was filled with grams and half-grams. That would probably be enough. I started the car and revved the engine, made sure my beeper was clipped to my jeans, lit a cigarette. It was 11 o’ clock at night, way past when I usually worked, but this would be worth it. I pulled out from behind the wall of trees around Katrina’s house, turned down and got onto Ballinger Way and followed the dark winding road to the top of Lake Washington. Then I turned left and up toward Lake City, passing the police station, doing the limit. With some things, I’d discovered, it was just easier to follow the rules.

  I’d been doing this for a couple of years now, and had finally found something I was good at, something that paid well, that wasn’t utter humiliation. I was finally fitting into the fabric of economic society, the so-called normal world, the world of winners and losers, buyers and sellers, the ones who have and the ones who don’t. I was luckier than most, actually, because I liked my job. I was providing a product that people really needed, not something they thought they needed because they’d been lied to a million times. There was no bullshit, no scam. Heroin didn’t lie. It was just about the only thing that didn’t. There was no marketing campaign, no advertising, no airbrushed photos, media spin, no crap about four out of five doctors recommending this or that brand over another. Beto and the other suppliers I occasionally dealt with were completely reasonable. No one was putting on a happy face and screwing you behind your back.

  I had used my contacts in the music scene to get a few customers, some of the late punk guys who had turned to drugs and a few of the early grunge guys. Some of them had stripper girlfriends. The rest had just found me somehow, drawn like moths to a flame. I was reliable and had the best heroin in town. Sometimes I took my time, but I always called people back and always showed up, they could depend on me to eventually get there and give them what they needed.

  I had two rules. One, no fronts. I’d seen what happened with other dealers, they had been too soft and opened the floodgates to the sob stories, the excuses, the begging, the whining. The games. The little gifts, only so they could extract favors later on, the false niceties, the probing questions, trying to find out what I was interested in, trying to unearth some tiny piece of information they could use to their advantage. The wanting to ‘hang out.’ I made it clear that if people wanted dope, I was their man. If they wanted to play games I was not. Better to just be firm about that stuff right off the bat, it made for infinitely fewer problems. The second was I wouldn’t go looking for business. I wasn’t going to be a pusher, hanging around schools, trying to get kids strung out. That whole thing had just been a myth, from what I’d seen, almost an urban legend, there was plenty of business around without having to go look for it.

  I pulled into the Denny’s in Lake City, walked in, sat at a booth. A waitress walked over.

  “Can I have a cup of coffee?” I asked.

  She put her pad away without writing anything and came back a few minutes later. I poured in three packets of sugar and a little plastic container of cream. The color wasn’t light enough, and I poured in another little bucket.

  Krissy walked in about ten minutes later. Her boyfriend had been one of my first customers. She worked at Rick’s, a strip club down the street, the best one in town. I wasn’t sure exactly what she did besides stripping in Rick’s but she did something. She would regularly pull in seven to nine hundred dollars a night, which was far more than the girls who simply took their clothes off. She was with another stripper named Desi, a tall brunette. They were dressed down after work but they still had that walk, fully aware that every guy in the place was watching them.

  “Hi,” Krissy said as they sat down in the booth.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Ummm, can we go?” Krissy asked, after I made no move to get up.

  “Have a cup of coffee,” I said.

  I could tell they were in a hurry to get high, they were squirming. I knew that feeling, when it’s so close, the anxiety gets turned up, but I wasn’t going to attract attention by walking out right away. The devil’s in the details. We sat there and tried to make conversation, then after about fifteen minutes I paid, and they f
ollowed me out to my car. Krissy bought a gram for three hundred and bought another gram for another stripper. Desi bought a half-gram. Sometimes, the girls from Rick’s bought a thousand dollars worth a night. I probably could have sold to them and no one else but then what would I do during the day? I dropped them off a couple of blocks from Rick’s and drove back home, obeying the speed limit the entire way.

  [1990]

  I drove slowly down the tree-lined street, looking up at house numbers, glancing down at the address scrawled on the scrap of paper in my hand. Eventually I found the house and parked, stubbed out my cigarette in the ashtray, scanned the street, then looked in the mirrors. I leaned forward and removed the dope and my plastic gram scale from their hiding place under the edge of the console. If the cops ever stopped me, all I had to do was reach down and push it all the way under the console and it would end up on top of the transmission by the base of the stick-shift. It was a pain to get it back out of there, but it was doable. I scanned up and down the street again, empty except for some kids playing down the block. I walked around the side of the house and down a short flight of cement steps that led to the door of a basement apartment. Sally, another stripper, had told me about her. I’d grilled her to make sure I wasn’t getting set up. I hadn’t gotten that feeling, and now I was here. I expected the usual, another chatty stripper, another good customer.

  “Hello,” she said quietly. She smiled a faint smile, and stepped aside to let me in. She was prettier than most, pale with red hair, tall and thin. Her eyes were hidden behind long bangs. She was wearing tight white jeans, heels and a button up shirt. As I stood there looking at her, time seemed to slow down. I walked in and stood in the center of the room. She closed the door and faced me.

  “I’m Tommy,” I managed.

  “Mmm, hi. I’m Monica,” she said, quietly.

  The apartment was plain but clean. A couple of band posters were tacked up on the walls. She gestured toward a white cloth couch and we sat down, her at one end and me at the other. I’d gotten very good at reading people, sensing danger or whether they were full of crap but every time I glanced over at her she looked down or away, not out of any attempt to deceive me but a genuine shyness. She wasn’t babbling on about whose dope was the best or about who she knew and did I know them too. That was unusual. When I wasn’t looking I could feel her eyes on me, studying me.

  “Do you work at Rick’s?” I asked.

  “I used to,” she replied, “but it got too weird.” I knew what that meant. Girls like Monica never lasted too long at strip clubs because they’re just so much more beautiful than the others and eventually get driven out.

  “I’ve been looking for a regular supplier,” she said.

  “Well, I’m pretty regular,” I blurted out, without thinking. She laughed. It took me by surprise. From my pocket I took out the dope and my scale. She moved closer on the couch to see what I was doing.

  “How much do you want?” I asked.

  She told me and I weighed out her piece on the scale and added a little extra, like I always did with strippers.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  I looked up at her, and she swept the hair out of her eyes.

  This was why I didn’t screw around with most strippers, even the few who threw themselves at me. They still had their dreams. Or delusions. Either way, they still believed in something, even if it was something that didn’t exist. Even if the words that came out of their mouths or the way they dressed said different, their eyes were filled with a kind of innocence. They were still waiting. Waiting for prince charming, or a baby or a family, or the stars to line up a certain way and then everything would fall into place to save them and they would stop doing drugs and be happy.

  Monica was not waiting. She had the light of youth in her pale blue eyes but there was something else there as well, something to do with death. The intelligence in them told me that she knew a man or a baby wouldn’t save her. Even all the money or heroin in the world wouldn’t save her. Like me, she knew damned well she would have to save herself. At that moment, I knew something was going to happen between us. That strange magnetic thing was happening again, and I could feel our bodies getting closer on the couch, as if the hands of some god were pushing us together.

  [AUGUST 22, 1999]

  The nutritionist was in the room. She looked like one of those people who are glowing so brightly they look unnatural, radioactive. She was probably one of those Buddhist yoga freaks. I personally didn’t have anything against these New Age types. They’d just chosen to be that way, but I suspected they’d done it as a way to deal with the horrors and absurdity of the world. I could understand that, but they gave the impression that everything was okay. Everything was not okay.

  “I want to get this damned tube out,” I said to her.

  “Well, we might be able to do that soon,” she replied, “but we have to be sure you can eat enough, get enough calories and protein that your wounds don’t have a setback.”

  “I’ve been trying to get down four cans of Ensure every day.” “That’s good, but once we take this out you’re going to have to replace it with food.”

  “I can do it,” I said, bluffing. I’d always been indifferent. Food was just an annoying inconvenience that was necessary to fuel these ridiculous bodies, keep them going on their road to nowhere.

  “I’m going to speak with the doctor. Maybe we can take it out tonight. But you’re going to have to maintain your nutritional levels.”

  She showed me some forms, checklists of some sort.

  “You’re going to have to fill these out every day, keep track of what you’re eating, to make sure that you’re getting enough nutrients and protein.”

  “I will.”

  “Once we take it out, you’re going to have to eat more than Frosted Flakes and Ensure,” she said, hammering on and on.

  “I will. I promise.”

  “Okay. I’ll see what I can do.”

  Later that night CJ came in.

  “It’s time to get that tube out. Are you ready?” she asked.

  “Mmm hmm. Yeah.”

  She removed the tape holding the tube to my nose and disconnected it from the bag.

  “Okay, lean forward.”

  She started to pull. I could feel the tube coming up, dragging up the back of my throat, out my nose. It seemed to go on and on. I could see the color of the tube changing as it came out of me, getting darker and darker.

  Finally, it was over. The tube was completely black, dripping with slime, thicker in some places, caked with some kind of deposit. It looked like something that’d been pulled out of a tar pit, the depths of hell.

  “Why is it black?” I asked, incredulous.

  She went on to explain something about stomach acids, the functions of digestion and such, things that were going on inside me every damned minute of every damned day. Man, I thought, the human body. Pretty on the outside, sometimes, but inside, under the mask of our skins...disgusting. A war zone.

  [AUGUST 24, 1999]

  My mom was in for a visit. She was sitting in the chair by the window. The social worker entered, bright and cheerful, as usual.

  “Hello,” she said smiling, “you’re Tom’s mom, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” my mom said.

  “How are you today?” she asked her.

  “Ohhh, just fine.”

  That was what she always said. It could be the shittiest day of her life and she would still say she was ‘just fine.’ That kind of pride didn’t exist anymore. Like the kind of love she knew, it was obsolete. Now people were encouraged to tell everyone in the whole damned world their problems, they even had TV shows where people paraded their malfunctions and dysfunctions out there for all to see, sometimes even pimping out their screwy kids, like our sick society was something to be proud of. It made me ill.

  “He’s doing better,” she said to my mom, then turned to me.

  “I�
��ve got your intake appointment set up for the methadone clinic. It’s for September 29. I spoke with everyone and we think this will coincide closely with your discharge date.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  She’d already ordered me a monthly disability check and a disabled parking permit, and I knew the red tape that was involved with getting that crap out of the government, I’d dealt with those people before. It was hell. This was one reason why I’d liked selling drugs so much, because I’d been totally self-sufficient, didn’t have to ask anyone for anything, didn’t have to go through all those humiliations trying to get people to help you, listen to you. I hadn’t had to talk to anyone. Things were going to be a little different now. And I wasn’t particularly looking forward to it.

  [1990]

  Broken down cars littered the street, sitting along curbs or up on blocks in driveways. I was lost in the Central District, one of the few neighborhoods I didn’t know my way around in. My beeper was going off like crazy, and I couldn’t find a pay phone. I’d stopped at a couple already but they were broken. Getting impatient, I found my way back to Madison, a main arterial where I spotted another pay phone. I debated whether to stop, then just kept driving. If I could just find the house I could make all the calls I needed. At Martin Luther King Way, I headed south. It was the middle of summer and the sun was hot. I had the windows of the Camaro rolled down but it didn’t help much.

  After driving for another fifteen minutes I finally found the house. I parallel parked, got out, and climbed up the steps. Norris, our lawyer, answered the door. He didn’t look like I imagined a lawyer, but more like a cleaned up hippie with a potbelly, rumpled clothes and a dying ponytail. The other band members were already there, sitting on couches around the living room, sipping on beers. I couldn’t see our manager, Smitty. My beeper went off again. I approached Norris.