American Junkie Page 21

  With Greg’s help I dried myself off and threw on a robe. Carefully, I limped back to my room, leaning on the cane. I felt fragile, a house of cards, a bunch of toothpicks glued together, like if I stumbled, I would fall to the ground and break apart. My left hip joint didn’t bend or swivel. It was pretty much fucked. I’d asked the doc about it last time he was in, a week back. He said that from the x-rays it appeared that after I started standing, bearing weight, the top of my leg bone had pushed up into what was left of the socket and was basically stuck in there. It was pretty amazing, he said, he’d never seen anything like it. Amazing or not, it’d made it hard to get dressed, especially the socks. I had to sit on the edge of a chair, curl my left leg under the right in order to even reach that foot.

  I managed to put on some jeans and sneakers, a t-shirt and an Adidas track top, stood and looked at myself in the full-length mirror on the closet door. My feet formed a ninety-degree angle, like a ballet dancer. I’d been gaining weight and my face didn’t look like a shrunken head, a death mask anymore. I levelled my pelvis, and my left foot rose two inches off the ground. Balanced on one leg, I stood there marvelling at the punishment the human body can endure. But then I wondered how much of what I was seeing was accurate. All those years I’d been getting thinner, more pale, more dead, I hadn’t noticed. Was my vision screwed, or had I just not wanted to face it? My right arm only bent halfway, permanently dislocated, a part of the bone floating loose under the skin. As a result I’d had to smoke cigarettes with my left hand. Neither of my hands functioned properly, except for my thumbs and forefingers. I noticed that the deep scar on my left forearm looked almost exactly like the one my dad had after the accident in Alaska. Was it some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy? I tried to imagine what all this damage meant for the future, what limitations I would have but all I could come up with was that I couldn’t give anyone the finger anymore. Grabbing my cane, I limped down the hall. The nurse at the station smiled as I made my way to the recreation room. Once there I got a cup of coffee from the machine and limped out onto the sun deck. It smelled like rain.

  [JULY 1997]

  It was sunny and hot, the middle of summer. I steered the Camaro up the cracked cement streets that switch-backed their way up the east side of Queen Anne Hill. Cars sat parallel parked on each side of the street, baking in the sun. I pulled up outside Layne’s and stubbed out my cigarette. His old red Pontiac Bonneville and a new Harley Springer were parked outside. He was expecting me so he opened the door when I knocked. I made my way to the living room and sat down on the floor. His apartment was nice, but not really a home, half lived in or half moved out of. A leather couch sat crookedly in the center of the living room, the only piece of furniture. A collection of spoons, syringes, glass pipes and plastic hoses were strewn around on smudged newspapers in front of it. The blinds were closed as usual, shutting out the light and with it the panoramic view of Puget Sound.

  Layne had stopped touring with Alice in Chains a few years before. After that he’d done a few things, the Mad Season album, a couple of shows, but he hadn’t left Seattle except for the Alice in Chains Unplugged show in New York. His girlfriend had died of endocarditis, a heart infection at Harborview last October. She’d always wanted him to quit, and he’d always wanted her to quit, and neither of them had ever been able to. I’d seen that before, junkies had lots of good ideas, they just never seemed to be able to use them on themselves.

  We sat down on the living room floor and did the deal. I didn’t have anyone else to meet that day so I hung out while Layne shot up and smoked crack. We talked a little but, as usual, there was not much to say. Despite that there was an odd comfort level, more than the basic junkie comrade thing.

  I’d cut down on my customers more than ever, and was only meeting about six or eight people every day, people who had money, or at least didn’t have to steal or scam, customers who bought a lot and I could be pretty sure were safe. Every day I would wake up around 11AM, shoot up, go to The B&O Café, have a warm croissant with butter and jam and some coffee, then make my rounds until around four. I would start work after the morning rush hour and quit before the evening rush. If I worked later than I planned, I would wait until seven or so, when the rush was over, before going home.

  I’d lost a lot of weight, probably about thirty pounds. I only worked for a few hours every day, rarely leaving my car, then after I went to Monica’s apartment, did shots, stared at the TV and nodded out. I wasn’t making as much money as I used to, but I still had about thirty-five grand stashed out at my mom’s. I could have worked more, made more money, bought a bunch of things, nice clothes, but there was no reason to. In fact, I never bought anything except another used car when the one I was driving broke down. I could have bought a nice mask of respectability, a cool outlaw drug dealer mask, I could have worn trendy clothes and driven expensive cars, I probably could even have bought a house if I’d wanted. But it would have been a lie. And despite everything, I still hated lies more than anything else. This was where I belonged. These were my people, the outcasts, the losers, the misfits. The ones who had not. The ones God forgot.

  Sufficiently high, Layne decided we should take a ride on his new bike, the Harley outside. Having nothing better to do I said sure. It was starting to get dark, and I hung on as he steered the bike down the skinny streets, coming close to the cars on each side, the beam of the headlight sweeping back and forth across the road. The bike felt huge and powerful, and the way it was weaving it seemed like it had a mind of its own and could suddenly go out of control and crash at any second and there was nothing either one of us could do about it. We made it to the bottom of Queen Anne, rode through Belltown and stopped at Bad Animals recording studio on 4th. I wasn’t sure why Layne wanted to stop there, but I didn’t ask. It wasn’t my deal, I was just along for the ride. The place was empty except for one guy running around, a watchman maybe, although he didn’t look like one. We went into one of the sound booths and Layne spread out his pipes and hoses and contraptions on the leather padding of the soundboard, the glass and plastic parts all stained dark brown with coke residue. He put the Mad Season album on the sound system. I’d heard it before but I suddenly realized that Layne’s voice seemed better, sharper than on the Alice in Chains albums, where the producers had made the mistake of drowning his naturally gifted voice under layers and layers of overdubs. I don’t know anything, I don’t know anything, I don’t know anything, I don’t know who I am....

  Layne assembled his latest gadget and demonstrated it for me, a crack pipe attached to a long flexible plastic hose designed to snake up the inside of his sleeve. I hadn’t done coke since the OD in Dick’s bathroom, for some strange reason I hadn’t felt like it, but when Layne offered I did some anyway. I wasn’t sure if I was doing it wrong, or if shooting had spoiled me, but like every other time I had smoked crack I couldn’t feel it. After Layne smoked for a while we headed up to see Mark Lanegan. The sun had gone down all the way and the lights of the city had come on. It was still warm, and the breeze that funneled through the downtown buildings felt good. Layne weaved the Harley down Fourth Avenue, then turned up Pike toward First Hill.

  I’d been selling to Mark regularly for about a year, since Screaming Trees split up. I would usually stop by his apartment once a day, then he’d burn through what I sold him and call me late at night after I’d closed for more. Eventually I began hiding pieces of heroin in his apartment when he wasn’t looking, and when he called me in the middle of the night I would tell him where they were, and just collect the money the next day. His apartment was a wreck. In the living room a path snaked its way through mountains of books and records that were piled everywhere. I gave Mark some dope, then sat down on the floor and flipped through stacks of records looking for old Stranglers albums. Mark disappeared into the bedroom and I stashed a half-gram inside a CD and put it back on the shelf.

  On our way back to Layne’s we rode through downtown. It was fully dark now,
around midnight. The lights of the city seemed to stretch as we rode past them, like my eyes couldn’t quite keep up. At First and Pike we came to a red light. The Donut Hole, the porno theatres and the crummy bars were all gone. New buildings were being put up in their place, shiny glass and steel, but something had been lost in the transition. They were trying to clean up this part of town, make it safe for tourists.

  The Champ Arcade sign drew my eye, with its hundreds of flashing yellow and white light bulbs. It and The Showbox were all that remained of the old world. The stoplight changed to green, Layne gunned the engine and we were off again, weaving all over the road. I resigned myself to just hang on and closed my eyes. Whatever was going to happen would happen. It was out of my hands.

  [OCTOBER 17, 1999]

  “Tom! Tom!”

  It was Greg. I’d fallen asleep on the couch in the dining room.

  “Tom, you can’t wear those jeans all day. They could cause pressure at the wound sites. They could re-open.”

  “All right, all right,” I said, chuffed. Now that I’d started wearing jeans I didn’t want to go back to those hospital pyjamas. He helped me up and walked alongside me as I limped back to my room. When we got there he helped me get the jeans off and I put on some scrubs.

  “There. Satisfied?” I said.

  “Tom, we’re just trying to help you.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. Have you heard anything about my appointment at the methadone clinic?”

  “No. But I’ll get the social worker. She might know. Okay?” She showed up a half hour later.

  “They finally called from the clinic. I’ve got your intake appointment,” she said. “It’s for the 27th.”

  Somehow I wasn’t as excited as I thought I would be. I could feel something approaching, reality, my re-entry into the world out there, without heroin, and without my old job.

  [AUGUST 1998]

  I stepped out of the door and the noonday sun hit me full force. I cringed like an insect under a magnifying glass. This wasn’t the sun I remembered from when I was a kid, a gentle sun you could play under shirtless all day. This was something new, something much harsher, the malevolent sun of an alien world. Hurriedly, I put on my sunglasses and continued toward the car.

  Monica and I had split up, if you could call it that, since we’d never really been together. She had found what she called a boyfriend, some guy whose parents had given him a house and he’d cajoled her into trying to play the domestic happy couple. She’d even ditched her long-term sugar daddy. I let her go. It seemed like the right thing to do. I never had been, and never would be, in any condition to play house. Ever. I really cared for her, and wanted her to be happy, even if it was just a delusion. She wanted to take another shot at living like other people. I had no such illusions. I’d made my choice and was going to stick with it.

  I’d lost even more weight, was surviving on coffee, maybe a croissant every few days and doing ten or twenty shots of heroin every day. The only thing that mattered was keeping a certain amount of money coming in. That required making my rounds, and when I did, I usually never left the car. On the rare occasions I was out in public, getting coffee or at the store, people gave me strange looks and steered clear, they probably thought I was dying of AIDS. It would have been a reasonable assumption.

  I slid into the car and the vinyl of the bucket seat burned my ass and back. Already sweating, I turned the ignition and the Camaro rumbled to life. Revving the engine a couple of times, I took my stash out of my pocket and slid it into its hiding place under the edge of the console. I lit a cigarette, put the car in reverse, looked in the mirror and raised my arm up to the top of the steering wheel. Preparing to back out, I began to turn the wheel and felt something give. My forearm had jerked and now appeared slightly crooked. I felt around the bandaged part of my forearm where I’d been shooting up and moved my arm back and forth. Something was loose. I sighed, muttered fuck, and turned off the car.

  Back in the house I unwrapped the Ace bandage. The wound in my forearm was deep, about halfway through. As I felt around in the wound my finger slid over a couple of lumps. In the bathroom I looked at my arm in the mirror. I still couldn’t tell what had happened, but I assumed that a bone in my forearm had dissolved and had finally broken. In the bedroom I got into my grocery bag of medical supplies. Damnit, I was out of gauze. How many things were gonna go wrong today? I had shit to do. At least it wasn’t a flat tire or something. Then I would’ve had to spend a few hours waiting at the shop. I took a paper towel and plugged it into the hole in my arm. I dug up an old wooden drumstick I had lying around and leaning it against the mattress I broke it in half with my knee. I wound the Ace bandage back up my forearm, trapping the piece of drumstick underneath it as a makeshift splint. I would have to find a new place to shoot again, maybe one of the places I used to shoot in that had healed, probably what was left of my butt again or my shoulders.

  I made sure my sunglasses were on and walked back out into the burning sun. The car was like an oven. I turned the ignition on and gripped the steering wheel with my thumb and forefinger. I tried turning the steering wheel back and forth a couple times. Thank god there were apparently two bones in people’s forearms. Thank god for power steering. I backed the car out of the driveway and headed out to make my rounds.

  [OCTOBER 24, 1999]

  I woke up. The TV was on. I didn’t want to get up, or do anything and fell back asleep. I woke up again and the light in the room had changed. Nothing else. The TV was still on and I was still there.

  In five days I would be leaving. It’s not that long a time. Was I supposed to think five days ahead, or eight, or ten, or two months, or three years? I’d never been able to regulate it, as soon as I started thinking about the future, every possibility of every minute of every upcoming day flowed into my head like a broken water main. One day at a time, that’s what they say at those meetings. I’d never been able to grasp that concept. Seemed to me that’s what I’d been doing my entire life.

  Five minutes have passed, according to my watch. Seemed like a lot longer. I looked out the door of my room. Occasionally people walked past, on their way somewhere, maybe. Today the thought of going out there filled me with a sense of dread, like stepping out the door would be stepping into a river, a current, and I would be swept away, carried downstream towards a waterfall. I lay back and fell asleep.

  I woke up again. My mom was there. Not the other. Not the one I call mother. I hadn’t seen her for years. When she’d discovered I was a heroin addict she’d dropped me like a hot potato. But this one was still here. I may never understand her, may have way more in common with the one I call mother, but this one is the one that had never let go. That had to mean something.

  [WINTER 1998]

  There was no reason to leave the house anymore. Beto came by once a week to drop off the heroin, and Katrina had started taking care of the deliveries. It had taken her longer than most, but she’d finally tired of pot and gotten herself strung out. Naturally. Every day, I’d fix her up, tell her where to go and then nod off or disappear into the television. Even if I’d wanted to go out, it was getting increasingly difficult to walk, or to even get up off this mattress. It was like a fucking military operation just to make it to the bathroom. My body was getting thinner and thinner, feeding on what was left of itself, collapsing inward, slowly getting sucked into the void inside me.

  A few weeks back I’d checked my weight on the scale. 120 pounds. I looked like a concentration camp victim. I’d started shooting in my butt cheeks again, the only place I had left. After the situation with my right forearm, I’d moved to just over the elbow until my tricep melted away, then to my left forearm and that went quick. My ass cheeks weren’t going to last long either. Holes had developed in the sides, craters the size of softballs, big enough that I could stick my fingers into and feel the bone, feel my hip joint moving. Pretty soon there would be nothing left, I would truly disappear. I’d done m
y best to opt out of the human race, that swarming mass of noise and madness, and soon it would be complete.

  Days went by, one after the other, never awake or asleep but somewhere in-between, drifting in and out, opening and closing my eyes. Waiting. Next to the mattress were two-liter Coke bottles filled with piss. They looked like apple juice. Next to that were a couple of hard turds wrapped in paper towels. Wads of paper towels sat next to the mattress, stuffing I’d pulled out of my wounds. They were yellowish brown, in certain places the body fluids or plasma or whatever were so thick they had dried into what looked like amber crystals. Every few days I ate something, a piece of lemon pound cake from Starbucks, sometimes a bowl of cereal, a slice of pizza now and then if Katrina brought one. I took a dump every few weeks if that, and then it was like having a baby out my ass. Sometimes it got stuck and I had to stick my finger up there, break it into smaller pieces.

  Soon it would be over. I had eliminated all my animal drives for food, for sex. My human traits, thinking and feeling, would soon be gone as well. I was not myself, not anyone or anything. I wasn’t even a human being. I was just some faint electrical activity inside rotting flesh and bone, operating not even on instinct but just habit.