American Junkie Read online

  [SUMMER 1994]

  There was a noise, banging and crashing and shouting, somewhere, off in that peaceful place where you’re half awake, where you can’t tell a dream from reality. The noise got closer and closer until eventually I began to wake up. I came around slowly, still feeling it from my last shot. Is that a gun? It was. And I wasn’t seeing quadruple, there were three more, all aimed at me. I recognized that they were cops, but I was still unable to fully grasp the reality of the situation. I remember thinking “What the hell are they yelling for? I’m right here.” They looked like mad barking dogs, jaws flapping on angry faces, spit flying. Behind them others were shouting in the living room. I tried to sit up.

  One of them pounced, rolled me over onto my stomach and put his knee hard into my back. He twisted my arms behind me and put handcuffs on my wrists. Effortlessly two of them picked me up and dragged me out of the bedroom, through the living room and to the kitchen where they sat me down in a chair. One of them stayed to keep an eye on me. There were about ten of them, all in black with bulletproof vests and helmets, pistols strapped on their legs and in shoulder holsters. I thought it was a bit excessive, a little over the top. They started in on the house. Everything that was on a shelf was thrown on the floor. Then the shelves were torn down and the furniture tipped over. They turned over the mattress and emptied the closets. From outside one of them brought in a much calmer and quieter dog that sniffed around. My drugs were all in a Bubble Tape chewing gum box right next to my mattress. My guns were on the shelf in my closet, in plain view. I hadn’t hidden them. I knew that if they didn’t find them, no matter what I said they would start tearing up floorboards and hacking into walls with axes, which would get me into a spot with the owner of the house. And worst of all, they would get pissed off and when it came time to make a deal it would be more complicated.

  I sat in the kitchen and waited. If they had just talked to the cops who busted me a couple years before, they would have known that I was reasonable, that I wasn’t going to go down in a hail of bullets, a martyr to something or another. I thought about telling them that they didn’t have to go through their whole mad dog act. I thought about telling the one cop who had called me the worst scum on the face of the earth that he was just plain misguided. But I just kept my mouth shut.

  After the first bust, I had begun preparing for this. I knew that no matter how many rules I made and sometimes broke or how careful I tried to be it was impossible to eliminate all risk. From what I’d seen it was just the nature of the business. Once the cops got you on their radar, eventually they came back around to you. I was fairly certain it was one of my customers who had ratted me out. I had tried to keep tabs on them, but that only went so far, it was impossible to know what they were up to all of the time. So in my travels around the drug scene I had started keeping my ears open, making connections with other lower level dealers who I would keep on my radar in case I needed them someday. Get out of jail free cards.

  While waiting I had been sorting through the cards and deciding which one to give them. It was a dilemma. Most of them were dealers like me, and even though some were higher on the food chain, most weren’t hardened criminals. They were just regular people, trying to get by, like me. A couple of them I even knew a little bit. But there was one guy that Monica had hooked me up with who was outside my immediate circle of clients and associates who I sensed was kind of a bad guy. He lived down on Airport Way. I’d bought from him a couple of times. There was no softness, no gentleness to him at all. He had hardened criminal written all over him.

  The cops’ rabid dog act lasted for about an hour and a half. They seemed to enjoy it. When it was over, my house was a shambles, like someone had turned it upside down. The cop in charge, who looked like the cowboy from the Village People, came and sat next to me. He had my pistols, a Sig Sauer P220 and my Beretta 92 and my Bubble Tape box in his latex covered hands. I don’t even know why I had those guns, I certainly didn’t need them, and I didn’t run around town flashing them like some kind of badass. I had no illusions about being some kind of tough guy who blathered on about honor among thieves or upholding the criminal code. I wasn’t a part of some crime family. I wasn’t a part of any family. Nor was I a part of any gang, clique, club, band, team, political party or labor union, church group or sewing circle. I didn’t even consider myself a citizen of the United States. I was, in the most literal and truest sense of the word, alone.

  The cop was staring at me, waiting for me say something. I had about ten grams of heroin, so I knew I was in a much bigger spot than the last time and wouldn’t be able to get out of it by simply giving them some useless piece of information. This time I would have to become what they called a confidential informant, buy drugs from someone and give it to them, so they could trade up and bust someone bigger than me. Or someone they thought was bigger than me.

  “Are there more guns or heroin in the house?” the cop asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “You’re in a lot of trouble.”

  “I know.”

  He rambled on for a bit about how much trouble I was in, trying to scare me. Then, finally, he got around to saying what he could have said two hours before, that there might be a way out of this situation if I wanted to help them. The other cops hung around gloating. They looked at me with smug satisfaction. This was probably the high point of their jobs, putting the screws to people and watching them squirm. I paused for a minute, pretending to be conflicted, acting like I was having a hard time coming to the decision to turn on my so called brethren. Then I made the deal. In exchange they would forget about me, forget about my guns and my heroin.

  It wasn’t only my fear of jail that drove me to prepare for this. The main reason was that I didn’t want to be faced with having to throw Beto under the bus. He’d been my supplier for years and the closest I had to a friend, taught me the business and had always been there when I needed something. I wasn’t sure what I would do if confronted with that situation. I’d like to think I would have held out and not burned him, but the truth was that I just didn’t know. And besides all that, strange as it seemed, I had found a purpose in life selling heroin. It wasn’t the same as I’d known working on my uncle’s farm, but it was by far the nearest I’d come since.

  Heroin had saved me.

  Without it, I would surely have kept drinking, probably bumbled my way into someone’s life, maybe had kids and caused a whole lot of wreckage. My destructive tendencies had always tended to get amplified and aimed outwards when I was drunk. This must be how it came to be known as a ‘fix,’ I thought, because for me it had fixed everything. On heroin I didn’t need anyone, didn’t have to ask for anything. I had reached the pinnacle of freedom. It was strangely liberating to just not care whether this person liked me or not, or that thing worked out or not, make problems go away by throwing money at them, stop comparing myself to other people and torturing myself for not being able to live like them and most precious of all, to finally be rid of that stupid and futile compulsion to try and make sense of the world.

  All the madness, the cruelty that people inflicted on one another, all the sadness I’d always felt, none of it affected me anymore. I had found an identity and a strange kind of peace, and I was going to do whatever it took to keep it.

  [OCTOBER 6, 1999]

  Yesterday they sent another shrink in, this time a real psychotherapist, not just the mental health counselor. My reluctance to talk to them and the meltdown on my birthday had apparently combined to push my case past some kind of tipping point. They were bringing in the heavy hitters to try to ‘get me.’ But all he wanted to talk about was getting me on the brain pills again, just because I had a little cry, because I was depressed some of the time. It was my heart that was broken, not my brain. They don’t make any pills for that. You just have to get used to it. Or not.

  I’m not falling for it. Once they convince you something’s wrong, then it’s real, then it never
ends. Then you’re a victim. I’m not buying that mumbo-jumbo, that alphabet soup. New words, new diseases, new combinations of letters, bipolar, tripolar, quad vanilla latte. Cinco de mayo. Hold the mayo. No foam. Half calf soy boy and oh is that your dog he’s so cute and Jesus fucking Christ. Cha cha cha. They were making words meaningless, diluting them until soon there would be nothing left. All these newfangled disorders were just a bunch of crap they made up to sell pills that only worked for a minute, then you would need a new pill, a new dosage, and on and on ad infinitum. The need for human beings to experience pain and suffering was in our DNA. If we couldn’t get it because there weren’t any wars, famines, diseases, natural disasters, we would create it ourselves. It was completely normal.

  The psychotherapist seemed like a very nice man, and I could tell his concern was genuine. He asked questions, trying to ‘get me,’ to understand me. He wasn’t trying any of the standard tactics—“You just need to focus on the positive” or “You can’t love someone else until you love yourself”—and because of that I wasn’t feeling so combative. I listened and nodded when he made suggestions, saying I would seriously consider getting on some kind of medication. After he left I was alone. Did I need to be ‘fixed?’ Did I need to be reprogrammed, into becoming a happy consumer? Or did I just need to channel my destructive energy in another direction? Or did I just need a fucking reason?

  [OCTOBER 10, 1999]

  I was on an overnight pass. Mom had picked me up, we’d just had lunch and now were sitting, parked at Edmonds beach. There were a few puffy clouds in the sky, but it was mostly sunny, the light flickering on the choppy waves of Puget Sound. A ferry was coming in to the dock. A couple of kids were digging in the sand and a young couple were walking out onto the spit, their arms around each other.

  “When I die, I want to be cremated,” she said.

  “I want to be buried with Ole. If you can’t go to Alaska to dump the ashes, out in The Gulf where he died, just ride the ferry and dump them here. It’s the same water.”

  “Mom, that’s not going to happen for a while,” I said.

  I was bluffing. She was seventy-seven years old. She could die any time, and it had dawned on me that it was quite possible that she’d been waiting for me to either die or get better, and when one or the other happened, she could let go and be with dad in heaven. I knew that was where she thought she was going, she’d spoken about it enough times.

  I could have come to her for help before all this happened. But that was something I had been unable to do. I had the madness of my biological father flowing through my veins and the stubborn pride of my other father conditioned into me. That was why I’d been so determined to not ask anyone for help, for anything. I’d despised those people who relapsed over and over, who spent thousands of dollars at those bullshit treatment centers. I’d made the decision to follow the path I did all the way to the end instead of being half-assed. I’d committed to it instead of being wishy-washy. Was that so bad?

  Waves were coming in to the beach. My mom hadn’t changed. She was still talking about the past, about how good things used to be, usually a time before I came around, or at least before I went south. Today she was complaining about Sweden, about their decision to be neutral in WWII. I’d heard it before. Some car with a Swedish flag bumper sticker set her off.

  “Their flag is ugly! It’s ugly!” she barked.

  “They let the Nazi’s just walk right through! They let them walk right through!” she said bitterly, shaking her head.

  [DECEMBER 31, 1994]

  “I want to give you a skin graft” said Dr. Evans. “It involves shaving some skin from somewhere on your body, probably the front of your thigh. Then we’ll use that to cover your calf.”

  “How long will that take?” I asked. “How long will I have to be here?”

  “Probably about three weeks,” he said.

  “Umm, that’s a problem,” I said, propping myself up, trying to remain calm, “I have business on the outside.”

  Business. That’s what it all boiled down to anymore. Doing it. Getting it done. Buying, selling, calling people back, driving around in circles every day. But it was all I had. I’d accepted it. Everything else in my life had fallen away like dead skin. Evans sat on a rolling stool next to the bed and looked at me expectantly, waiting for an answer.

  I guess I hadn’t thought this through very well, coming to the ER. I couldn’t take time off. I’d assumed that when they saw I was a serious junkie they wouldn’t want to help me, waste hospital resources. I figured they’d just give me some antibiotics and send me on my way but somehow they’d talked me into staying and then quickly shipped me up to the eighth floor, the Burn Unit. What am I gonna do now? My calf was pretty fucked up again. I’d left it alone for a couple of years and it had healed, but recently I’d run out of other places to inject and gone back to shooting there. It was a mess. The bone was visible again. But still, three weeks?

  Evans was waiting for me to either agree, or say I was leaving. I was waiting for him to try to talk some sense into me, reason with me, or give me the ‘scared straight’ spiel, like the others. “If you keep doing drugs you’re going to die,” they would say, as if I didn’t know that already. Occasionally, just to mess with them I would reply, “Everybody gotta die sometime.”

  “Well, why don’t you stay for a day or two and think about it?” Evans asked calmly.

  It was a curve ball. I agreed, just to end the conversation. Evans eventually left, and when I was alone I thought about it. Why not? It wasn’t like jail, I could always walk out. They called it AMA, against medical advice. I’d done it before. I could make this a little vacation. I hadn’t had any time off for years, not even a day. I enjoyed my job, it just hadn’t occurred to me. Where would I go? Paris, The Bahamas, Thailand? It was too risky to take heroin with you. What would I do? Sit by the pool? I couldn’t do that, not with my wounds and scars. Gamble? That was the stupidest, the most pointless of all the addictions. No, this had become my life, to the exclusion of everything else. I could get Mick, my assistant, to run things for a bit longer. He wouldn’t mind. He liked playing the big shot drug dealer. Meanwhile I could recharge, heal up for a bit, and then go back to work.

  From previous visits, I knew how the hospital worked, as far as narcotics. If you tried to get drugs out of the doctors or nurses, chances were they wouldn’t give them to you, especially if you were a junkie. You could whine, you could cry, bitch, cajole, whatever, if they thought you were trying to get narcotics they wouldn’t give them to you. They would try to appease you with every damned non-narcotic drug first, until eventually you got tired of asking or were so gakked out on their weird drugs you fell asleep. But if you were just straight with them, and didn’t complain or cause problems, more often than not they would give you something. I’d been cooperative and they’d given me a Pain Cocktail that got me higher than shooting heroin out on the street.

  My roommate hadn’t learned this. He didn’t appear to have any visible problem, but he constantly complained about being in pain. Every ten minutes he was buzzing the nurses to try and get more drugs. He would listen for them coming, and when their footsteps approached the room, he would ramp up his whining. Then when they told him no and left the room he still droned on, apparently talking to me, even though there was a curtain between us. I tried to ignore him, hoping he would eventually realize that no one was listening and stop. I knew that if I said anything, even shut the hell up, he would probably just talk more and that would really make me sick. He’d somehow commandeered the remote control and after flipping channels for an hour he had settled on The Maury Povich Show. I watched for a few minutes until I started to feel nauseous, and a vision appeared in my mind, of Povich being decapitated on the pitchers mound at Yankee stadium. I needed to get the hell out of there and have a smoke. That much was certain. I swung my legs off the side of the bed, put on some scrub bottoms and slipped on my shoes.

 
; I glanced in at some of the patients as I walked past their rooms. Burn victims. Unlike me they’d been burned in house fires, car fires, fireworks, playing with matches. Accidents. They were immobile, wrapped in bandages like mummies. At the nurse’s station I watched a couple of little kids about three or four years old playing in the tiny rec-room on a miniature plastic Jungle gym. Their faces looked like plastic masks and they had no ears, eyebrows or eyelashes. The tops of their heads were bandaged, one with gauze wrap and the other a cap made of what looked like a white fishnet stocking, knotted on top of his head. One of them looked at me. His eyes, the only things that moved on his face, were a thousand years old and knew a kind of hell that I would never know.

  While waiting for the elevator I gazed out the floor to ceiling windows. Eight floors down on the street, cars and buses drove past and people were jaywalking. The elevator finally arrived. It was crowded and stopped at every floor on the way down. Huddled in the back corner, my mind started drifting back to that bastard Povich and I began daydreaming a movie scenario, an apparent homage to Taxi Driver, where I snuck onto his show, killed him on national TV with a knife, was immediately arrested, then eventually made a hero as millions of letters poured into the jail from grateful sons and daughters, thanking me for curing their parents and grandparents of their goddamned Povich addiction.

  Outside the hospital, patients had gathered in a smoking area fifty feet down the sidewalk. I didn’t want to go down there, and walked out near the street. As soon as I lit up, a woman about ten feet away glared at me. She had a rolled up yoga mat under her arm. Fuck. A future member of The New Age Police. She started walking toward me, braving the cloud of black exhaust from the bus driving by. I flashed my best get the fuck away from me face, but she just kept coming. Before she could start sermonizing, I turned on my heel and walked away. I could hear her sandals clap clapping behind me like Nazi jackboots as I dragged my IV stand down toward the smoking area.