American Junkie Page 17

“My name’s Tom. I’m in 302.”

  “I’m Claire,” she said as she turned around. She eyed me for a minute.

  “What happened?” she asked, indicating my arm. It was a warm early September day and I was wearing short sleeves.

  “I shot some drugs,” I replied, knowing she wouldn’t understand but wanting to say something.

  She gave me a confused look, of course. I decided to try and give her an explanation, although I was pretty certain she still wouldn’t understand. No one ever had.

  “I shot up in the same places over and over. After my veins all went away.”

  She still didn’t understand, but decided not to press any further.

  “I only shot up a few times,” she said, “and caught AIDS.”

  Her inability to comprehend the damage I’d done to myself marked her as a true innocent. She was really getting screwed, I thought. I’d committed just about every sin and crime in the book, shared needles thousands of times and gotten away with it and she’d done it a few times and was paying the ultimate price. But she didn’t seem too down about it.

  “Wow,” I said. There wasn’t anything else to say. She was going to be dead and maybe, I was too. It made it pointless to talk over the finer points of what, or how, we’d come to be there. Claire stood leaning on the railing and I sat in the wheelchair and smoked. The sun was shining down.

  A few minutes later another young woman showed up, her girlfriend apparently. Claire introduced me and then they moved into the day room and sat down on the black couch. It was a nice day and I tried to forget about them but my eyes kept being pulled back to the window. Through the glass I watched them talk, hold each other, touch each other, smile, laugh. It’d been a long time since I’d felt what they were feeling, love, desire, happiness. So this is how it works, huh? God never gives us more than we can handle? Tell that to Claire, I thought. Shouldn’t it have been someone like me who was dying? Why was I still here, after having made the decision that was costing Claire her life a million times?

  [SEPTEMBER 12, 1999]

  I took a step. Swung my right leg forward and put my weight onto it. I moved the cane forward with my left hand, planted it and lifted my left leg. It swung freely forward, like a pendulum. Even though it was a couple of inches shorter than the other leg it didn’t make it, my toe stuck on the carpet.

  There was no way I could dart my left leg out to catch myself, no way I could do anything. It was over. I seemed to hang there for a second, and then it began, in slow-motion. Instinctively I flung the cane away. My body automatically twisted to the right. At the last split second before I hit the ground my right shoulder tucked under me and I rolled.

  “God Fucking Damnit!” I yelled.

  I wasn’t very far from the nurses’ station and Greg came running.

  I had rolled and then kept rolling and landed face down, my mouth pressed into the carpet. I couldn’t move, couldn’t even get to my knees.

  “Tom? Are you okay?” Greg asked when he arrived, bending down and putting his hand on my shoulder.

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m all right,” I said impatiently. “Just help me up.”

  He retrieved the wheelchair, which was outside the door to my room, about ten feet away. He and another nurse picked me up off the floor, and helped me into it. I checked myself out, amazed that I hadn’t gotten hurt somehow.

  “Tom, you need to be more careful,” Greg said. “We’re happy to walk alongside you, you just have to let us know.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  “Maybe you should stick with the walker a little longer, until you’re stronger.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I replied.

  I’d come through unhurt. My body had acted of its own accord, to protect itself. It had twisted to keep me from falling right onto my hands, putting that much weight, that degree of impact on my right arm, which had only one bone in it now. Was that how I’d survived? Had my body intuitively known how much it could take and stopped me at the last second? Had it been some instinctive response, my picking up the phone, and my inability to put it down that day? I’ll probably never know. I’ll never know why I survived, why I’d gotten away with shooting up a million times and why Claire had gotten screwed. I would never know a lot of things and it was driving me crazy that I’d started looking for answers again. There weren’t any, and I knew that.

  [SEPTEMBER 14, 1999]

  “What’s that stuff?” I asked Greg, sitting in the ARJO. The water was up to my neck and it was hot. He was fiddling with some bottles, and some sort of packet.

  “We’re going to bleach your hair. Don’t you remember?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  What had I been thinking? Oh well, it was too late now. If I changed my mind, Greg would be disappointed. It was his idea and he was clearly enjoying this. I sat back in the tub. Greg had me hang my head over the edge and carefully combed my hair back so it wouldn’t get in my eyes. He applied the bleach and I could smell the chemicals. It took about a half an hour, then holding a basin under my head he rinsed out my hair thoroughly. When he was sufficiently happy with my hairdo he wheeled me back to my room. I paused before I climbed back into bed. Should I? I stood there for a minute, hanging on to the railing of the bed, trying to make up my mind. I’d been avoiding my reflection for the most part, hadn’t wanted to see it, see myself, shatter the illusion I had of myself in my mind. This time, for some reason, curiosity got the better of me. God, what a mess. I looked like a concentration camp victim with shoulder length bleached blonde hair. Sad. Absurd. Stupid. Ridiculous.

  [SEPTEMBER 16, 1999]

  “Goddamnit!” I shouted, hurling the remote control across the room. “Those fuckers!”

  The social worker stood there, shocked. She saw that there was nothing else for me to throw and retrieved the remote from the floor. Apprehensively she moved closer and placed it gently on the TV table. The methadone clinic had fucked up, they’d assumed because I was a Bailey-Boushay patient that I had AIDS, and had mistakenly placed me on an expedited list for intake. I would now have to make a new appointment, get in line again. I would have to wait.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, “I’ll get it taken care of. You might have to stay here a little longer.”

  “That’s the problem,” I growled, “I want to get the hell out of here.”

  “I know, I know. Look at it this way, it’ll be an opportunity for you to get stronger.”

  I started to calm down. She was right. I’d never been strong enough to make it in the world before, what made me think I could manage now?

  “I know,” I said, “thanks for all your help.”

  On the one hand I wanted to get out, and on the other I felt safe in here. It was a fine line, but if I just kept putting one foot in front of the other, if I stayed focused on walking one step more than the previous day, on trying to eat one more bite, as long as I was moving, doing something, I wanted more. But that could change in an instant if I started to think about the future, about the reality that awaited me, the fact that I had to basically start my life over from scratch, and then my mind spun out of control and I was gripped by a paralyzing fear. That world out there was terrifying enough, and now I would have to deal with it without some physical capabilities.

  “It’s looking good,” CJ said. She’d come in to do my dressings.

  “Really?”

  “Yes, all the smaller wounds, the bedsores, have healed and the larger ones are filling in. They’re right on track.”

  “I want to start tapering down the methadone,” I said. “Once I’m out and at the clinic they’ll only give me one dose a day.”

  “I’ll talk to the doctor. But I think that’s a good idea,” she said.

  I was just covering my ass. The methadone clinic would probably not even consider giving me 360mg per day, so I would have to get my dose down some before I left. My pill stash was growing and it made me feel a little safer. I hadn’t noticed a
ny withdrawal symptoms after I’d started taking three pills out of every nine so I figured I could handle lowering my dose. If it got weird and I started to feel sick I could just take out fewer pills.

  [1992]

  I was on the edge of downtown when my beeper went off. I didn’t recognize the number but was in between things and decided to call back. I stopped at Michael’s Market on Denny, put in a quarter in the pay phone outside and dialed the number.

  “Tommy?”

  It was Johnny.

  “Ummm, I....”

  When he just let the sentence trail off I knew what was up.

  “Where are you?” I asked.

  “I’m at a pay phone,” he said, “a block from the jail. On Second and....,” his voice drifted away, apparently looking for the cross street.

  “Johnny?” I said, trying to get him back.

  “Yeah?”

  “Be on the corner of First and Cherry in ten minutes,” I said.

  “Uhh, okay,” he replied.

  “And Johnny? Don’t be hanging around looking suspicious,” I added, then hung up. I got back into my car, retrieved the Bubble Tape container from its stash place, removed a fifty, set it on the console, close so I could pop it in my mouth if anything happened and put the container back in place.

  Johnny had been one of my first customers, he and his girlfriend Maria. They were a cute couple, one of those junkie couples that don’t realize their relationship is doomed, that are constantly making plans for the future. They had bought from me occasionally, around ’89, and then went off my radar. I’d heard that Johnny had gone into dealing. Around ’91, Maria had gotten pregnant. She and Johnny were planning on settling down, quitting the junk. But Maria was still stripping and when she began to show so much that she couldn’t dance anymore, she’d gone to the Déjà vu in Federal Way to get her last paycheck. I think she was seven or eight months pregnant at the time. She’d left the club and disappeared. Someone had seen her hitchhiking. A few days later someone found her body on the side of a road in South Seattle, stabbed to death. Johnny had been spiralling down ever since, he couldn’t keep his drug business together and kept getting himself busted for petty crimes every month or two. He would call me, I’d come down, pick him up and give him a piece of dope. It was against my rules, but I made an exception, I knew how people you loved dying could kill you as well. It was a little risky with all the trouble he was in all the time, but if he were going to try to set me up, it would probably happen before he went to jail, not right after he got out.

  I turned the corner at First and Cherry and spotted Johnny in a doorway. I pulled up and he walked out, squeezed between a couple of parked cars and got in. I drove up Cherry to Fourth, then headed north toward the freeway entrance. No one else had called and I was going to go home. After I’d driven a couple of blocks, gotten away from the jail and the downtown police station, I handed Johnny the fifty.

  “Thanks, man,” he said.

  “I don’t have any works,” I said, “you’re gonna have to dig that up on your own.”

  “No problem,” he said, “where are you headed?”

  “I’m goin’ home,” I said.

  “Can you drop me at the bottom of the Hill?” he asked.

  “Sure,” I said. It was on the way.

  Traffic was crazy and I had gotten off the arterials and ended up on some side street. Johnny looked out the window, and then up at the building we were driving past.

  “Hey, hey, Tommy? Can you stop here for a second? Just a sec?” he asked.

  I didn’t say anything, but there were a few parking spaces so I pulled over. I was about to ask what the hell we were stopping for when he jumped out of the car, said “I’ll be right back,” slammed the door and then took off running down the street. At the end of the block he turned the corner and was gone.

  I checked my surroundings. The side street was fairly quiet. Some kind of building was being put up across the street but apparently they hadn’t started yet. No one was around. I recognized that it was the street behind The Camlin Hotel. I’d had breakfast with Gisele once, years ago up in The Cloud Room, the restaurant on the top floor. It had a nice view over downtown. I didn’t do those sorts of things anymore.

  I lit up a cigarette. I was a little irritated. Johnny knew I didn’t like just sitting around in my car. It’s like an invitation for the cops to mess with you. As long as you keep moving, the odds of getting hassled are astronomically lower. There was nothing on my side of the street except a blank wall, the back of the hotel and the door, some kind of back entrance, I assumed. I finished the cigarette and lit another, checking the mirrors occasionally. If he’s not back by the time I’m done with this one, I thought, I’m just leaving his ass here.

  I was about to flick my cigarette out the window, when the door on the wall flew open and Johnny came staggering out, a huge television in his arms. He managed to make it to the passenger door. I heard a voice, “You need a TV?” I lunged across the front seat and pushed the passenger door open, flipped up the back seat. I wanted to say “What the fuck are you doing?” but stopped myself. He had gotten the TV for me, to pay me back for bringing him dope when he really needed it. Johnny squeezed the TV into the back seat and hopped in. “I took it from the bar in The Cloud Room,” he said, smiling, “and then carried it down the fire stairs.”

  [SEPTEMBER 20, 1999]

  The aquarium next to the nurses’ station was about three feet wide and two feet high. I sat in the wheelchair and stared at the little fish, bright and colorful like metallic rainbows, swimming back and forth, back and forth. Going nowhere. Greg said something to the desk nurse, then he continued pushing the wheelchair into the day room. A man was sitting hunched over one of the tables, in a wheelchair. He had a shaved head and a huge scar on his skull. A good-looking woman was feeding him with a spoon.

  We passed the door to the greenhouse and I looked inside. Plants? What the hell are they doing here? I was having a bad day and the methadone clinic foul-up was getting to me. It’d been four days and they still hadn’t called with a new appointment. I don’t know why I was surprised, from experience I knew those methadone clinics were red tape incarnate. What was my hurry to get out of here? Was it because I wanted to go out and try to live, in that crazy world, like a normal person? Or was it the demon in me, stealthily plotting, manipulating me, setting me up, getting me into a position where I ended up outside a dope house on a day when I couldn’t say no?

  Greg parked the geri-chair out on the sun deck, next to the cement ashtray, and locked the wheels. The sun was about to go down and there was a slight chill in the air, driving away the warmth. Greg covered me with a blanket. The detox had begun, my dose of methadone had been reduced to 320mg, eight pills four times a day. There hadn’t been any withdrawal symptoms and I was still taking three pills out every dose.

  “Who was that guy?” I asked, glancing back towards the dining room.

  “That’s Dave,” Greg said, “he’s got an inoperable brain tumor. They cut it out once but it came back. Now there’s nothing they can do.”

  “Wow. Bummer,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Greg replied.

  “Who’s that with him?”

  “Mmm, hmm. You like her?”

  Greg perked up a little, now that we were talking about sex, or sexual attraction. He always perked up when that topic came up.

  “Yeah. She’s pretty.”

  “That’s his sister. She’s married.”

  “Figures,” I said. Greg made sure I was comfortable, then said he would be back in twenty minutes.

  They’d only been letting me use the wheelchair for an hour or two a day but I’d been using the time to explore the hospice. Downstairs on the first floor was an outpatient clinic. AIDS patients who weren’t so sick came there to get pills and counselling. One room off to the side was filled with computers, set up along a wall. Patients played games on them, some game that involve
d the strategic moving of bricks. I’d never used a computer. Out behind the building there was a parking lot. Sometimes I would sit out there, wheel around in circles and think about the possibility that I might have to use one of these damn chairs for the rest of my life. It was a strange feeling, sometimes terrifying, but mostly not at all. Why couldn’t I find some middle ground? I either felt positive and hopeful, or I felt an overwhelming despair, like there was no way I would manage. Which was the reality? And which was the delusion?

  There were about twenty rooms on the floor but I hardly ever saw any of the patients. Many of them were probably like the guy at the end of the hall, couldn’t get out of bed and were dying. I hadn’t seen the gay guy across the hall from my room for a while. He seemed to have some kind of special arrangement, free to come and go as he pleased. He would be around for a few days, and then he would disappear for a few. We’d only nodded at each other, the couple of times we’d passed in the hall. I had however, met one patient, down at the other end of the floor, by the Blue Room, a young skinny hairdresser from Bainbridge Island. He told me about all the medications he had to take, dozens of pills every day. There were a couple of patients I hadn’t ever seen, but had heard the nurses talking about. One of them was in the last room before the art therapy room. He was almost dead, and had never been out of his room. And then there was the guy in the room next to mine. He’d had a stroke and couldn’t move or talk. He was Pakistani or something and about fifty, had a big family that came to visit a lot. They were always shouting and arguing amongst themselves, while he lay there, unable to move or talk. But he was awake, and aware. It must have been horrible.

  [SEPTEMBER 21, 1999]

  “Can I go out for a while? Take the bus somewhere?” I asked, sitting in the wheelchair in front of the nurses’ station. I’d discovered that some of the other patients could leave and go places during the day.