American Junkie Read online

  Don’t feel sorry for me. I just had some bad luck is all. Sometimes that’s all it takes, if you’re sensitive, a few events at the wrong times in your formative years, biology, circumstance, luck, chance, any or all, you can’t cope and something breaks, dies inside and you don’t have the tools to fix it. Some wounds are too deep. That’s what they mean when they say scarred for life. It happens a lot, you just don’t hear about it. Most don’t survive to tell the tale. Most die alone in a shitty motel room and no one ever knows.

  I know, it’s sad, it’s a tragedy. Boo fucking hoo. That’s what happens when hope dies. People die. Or go mad. Or get on drugs. Some writer wrote something about it once, about the best minds of a generation, running down the street, naked and starving, hysterical, screaming their heads off, looking for some kind of fix or something. Not implying that I’m a great mind or anything. I’m just saying. That’s what happens.

  You can call me a loser, you can call me crazy, you can call me sick. I don’t care. Dead people don’t care about anything. It’s one of the benefits. Dead people have “No worries, mate.” We are the only ones who can truly say that. It’s kind of nice. Be that as it may, I’m a bit confused as to how I got here. I didn’t just one day up and decide to destroy myself. It was a long process, imperceptible, like the setting of a sun. Along the way things happened, I made some adjustments, some corrections, some decisions. They seemed like the right moves at the time and before I knew it I was hooked on heroin, then I was selling heroin, and then I was essentially dead. It’s not so bad. Let’s face it, there’s nothing cooler than death. When you’re dead, no one can touch you. No one. When you’re dead, there is no more waiting.

  [1968]

  Ms. Kerr, my fourth grade teacher suddenly stopped reading. I looked up and she was staring at me. She slammed her book down, got up and marched around her desk and down the aisle and stopped right in front of my desk. She glared down and held out her hand. I knew what she wanted, I’d already been warned, the Eerie, Creepy, and Famous Monsters of Filmland magazines that I’d been showing to Talia in the next row. Ms. Kerr gathered them into her arms and held out her hand again. “All of it,” she demanded, “you’re distracting the class.” Reluctantly I handed her the rest of my things, a miniature plastic roulette wheel and a rubber snake. She strode purposefully back to the front of the class, made sure everyone was watching and hurled all my things into the trashcan next to her desk. She brushed her hands together, sat down again and picked up her book.

  That afternoon, like every Wednesday, she led the class out to the playground for kickball. I hung back as the other kids followed her single file out of the room. When they were all gone, I rushed over to the trashcan, dumped it out on top of her desk, sifted through the trash, got my things back, stashed them, and ran out to catch up with the others. When we returned from kickball she suspected me of course, but I feigned innocence and suggested maybe another student had done it. She still suspected me, even called my house and spoke to my mom, who assured her that I would never do something like that.

  After school, I went out to the street to wait for the bus. The usual group of boys were messing around, as always. I stood off to the side and watched them. I understood that they were just doing what people and animals had done since the beginning of time, getting together, establishing a hierarchy. They did it so they wouldn’t be alone, safety in numbers, it was a social thing. What I didn’t understand was why they had chosen the biggest, loudest, and most brutal one to be their leader. Why him? Unlike with a pack of wolves, there was no noble purpose driving his cruelty, no rhyme or reason behind his inflicting pain, his humiliating others, it was just some twisted game. What was so great about that? And the others in the group just went along with it. They seemed okay when they were alone, but when they got together they lost their minds, their individualities, their humanity.

  Occasionally they tried to lure me into their silly power games and on those days I did the one thing I had always instinctively known how to do for as far back as I could remember. I made myself invisible. Not really invisible, but I had always had the ability to just fade into the background until it seemed the world was going on around me and I wasn’t a part of it, a bystander, somehow separate, disconnected from it.

  On the bus ride home I sat off by myself and doodled on my Pee-Chee with my Bic Four-Color pen. Using the black ink I drew little arrows sticking out of the sports figures’ heads. In red, bullet holes oozing blood. I was aware that there was something different about me, I just wasn’t sure what it was. In some ways I was just an ordinary kid. I liked sports as much as the next kid, just not so much the ones that involved other people. But there was something, I felt it. I could never put my finger on what it was exactly, just some strange feelings. Sometimes, when I was brushing my teeth I would look into the mirror and wonder if what I saw looking back was really me, or if my face was some kind of mask. When I was around people, sometimes I would catch myself holding my breath and wonder what the hell I was doing it for. Other times I would suddenly have the awareness that I was actually a living breathing human being, that I was actually inside this body, that there was something beating in my chest and that everything I saw wasn’t a TV show or a dream, that what I saw was actually happening, right there and then. I would pinch or stretch the skin of my arm, just to prove it to myself.

  I got off the bus at my stop and walked home. My mom was pushing a Kirby vacuum back and forth across the living room carpet. We’d moved back to Edmonds, into a house, one street over from where we used to live. But it wasn’t anything like our old house. It was a rental, an old run down rambler, the sore thumb of the neighborhood. It had cheap doors made of warped paneling, peeling linoleum floors and flimsy window frames. By this time I’d begun to get an idea of our financial situation, and why my dad wasn’t building houses anymore. He’d gone into the construction business with a partner, who handled the money while my dad handled the construction. This partner had run up a bunch of debts and then bailed, and the whole thing crashed down on my dad’s shoulders. He didn’t know how to handle it, stopped going to work and escaped to the bar in Chopstick’s restaurant. Eventually he’d pulled himself together, gotten with some Norwegian friends who were fishing in Alaska.

  There’d been a couple of accidents, the last few years. We’d get a phone call, usually in the middle of the night. Once, someone on wheel watch had gotten drunk, passed out and crashed the boat onto a reef. The crew floated ashore in a life raft and spent three days waiting on a deserted island to be rescued. Another time they’d stacked the crab pots too high on the deck, and the boat had iced up and capsized. I’d heard my parents talking about other accidents, boats sinking, people dying.

  I dropped off my books, grabbed my soccer ball and went out into the back yard. The dead yellow grass crunched under my shoes. It was sunny, I remember. Hot. It might have been June. Paint was peeling on the falling down fence that surrounded the backyard. Across the street was a row of houses my dad had built, nice four bedroom two car garage jobs that looked down on our crummy rambler, perched like castles on their high mounds of earth. Scotty, a kid from down the street had showed up. He was about ten, a couple years older, and lived down the street in one of the houses my dad built. Somehow we started arguing about something, I don’t even remember what, throwing down cards one after another. Is so! Is not! Is so! Is not! Is so! Is not! I kept waiting for him to say what he usually said, My dad’s gonna sue you! but instead he pulled out the ace of spades. Oh yeah? Well, you’re adopted!

  As soon as he said it he ran off. I stood there, frozen. There was a feeling like something collapsing inside me. My heart started pounding in my chest. I felt cold and sick. I held my breath, trying to keep still. I don’t know how long I stood there, but I began to feel dizzy and weak, and I was sure that soon I would tip over. I leaned forward and took a step. Nothing happened.

  I managed to make it onto the patio and into the house
through the sliding glass door. I walked to the kitchen, sat on a barstool. I stared at the pattern on the Formica counter, the different sized overlapping triangular shapes. The edges were peeling up and muck and grease had collected in the gap between the Formica and the aluminium border. My mom was pulling wet dishes out of the sink and placing them in a rack on the counter. She saw me, and saw that something was wrong. After a minute I somehow managed to tell her what Scotty had said. She was speechless for a few moments, then said that it was true, they just hadn’t known how to tell me.

  I staggered into my room and sat down on the bed. Something was happening to me. A small cardboard box sat on the floor, filled with some things, a khaki armband with a small Norwegian flag sewn onto it, my dad’s identification as a member of the Norwegian resistance in WWII. A little wooden pirates treasure chest he’d given me, I’d filled with tiny firecrackers. The black and white photos taken on a road trip to Idaho a couple of years before I was born, in 1959. In one he sat slouched in the driver’s seat of a ’57 Cadillac, the door open, a cowboy hat pulled down over his eyes and a cigarette dangling from his lips. Father. That word had lost its meaning, as had mother and son and parents and family every other word in the entire English language. It was now stepfather, or adoptive father. Father, with an asterisk.

  I was not who I thought I was. Tom Hansen, the boy with two parents, four grandparents, eleven aunts and uncles and thirty-three cousins, was no more. What remained was a stranger, just a body, flesh and blood, skin, a heart, a face, and I didn’t know where any of it came from. Something had been lost, erased. I had been proud to be Tom Hansen. I had wanted to be that person. That was no longer possible. I still had the name, but it didn’t mean anything anymore. It was just a name, and like they say, what’s in a name? I’ll tell you. Not much.

  From this point on, I could do this or I could do that, but did it mean that I had done anything? I could say I did this, or I did that, but I wouldn’t really have any idea what I was talking about. I could say or do anything but what would be the point? What was the use of using words at all if they had no meaning?

  I had always been a quiet boy but now I retreated into myself even further. I began immersing myself in books. There was a truth in words on a page, when they came out of someone’s mouth they always seemed to inflate, enhance, disguise, or obscure the truth, but when they were on a page they just were, they weren’t directed at anyone in particular. I tried to go on like nothing had happened, but I was never sure if I was doing the right thing, never sure of anything. I tried to pretend that I was still the biological descendent of these good people who had taken me in, but this was the age of science. It was the final word on things, and it told me that was not true. A million questions took up space in my head, piling up like bricks. Who were they? Who was I?

  My parents looked on the adoption as a win win situation. I could understand that, for them, my life began when they picked me up. But something had happened before that, a mystery without answers. Sometimes thinking about it took over my mind and I couldn’t help wondering if these people, whoever they were, wherever they were, had gotten rid of me because they had seen something they didn’t like, some fundamental flaw. That thought turned over and over in my mind like a rock in a rock polisher until it became lodged inside me, something cold and shiny and hard.

  [1969]

  It was night. I was lying in bed, reading one of The Hardy Boys books. They were about two teenaged brothers whose dad was a detective. They usually got caught up in some kind of trouble, but between them they were always able to get out of it, solve crimes and bust the bad guys. One of the brothers or the dad would always come along and save the day at the last minute. It must be nice, I thought, to know someone would always come to the rescue. I was re-reading The Tower Treasure, the first in the series. At the same time I kept an ear to the street, hoping to hear the rumble of my dad’s ’66 Buick Le Sabre convertible. Sometimes, not often, he came home while I was still awake. Once, he’d told me he’d give me a nickel for every page I read.

  I turned off the light on the night table. It was late, past eleven. The room was dark, but for the glow from the streetlights coming in through the window. As usual, it was reflecting off the glitter sprayed on the ceiling, making it light up like little stars. I said the prayer that my parents had taught me: Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the lord my soul to keep, if I should die before I wake, I pray the lord my soul to take.

  I closed my eyes, and yet still looked ahead, as if I were staring at the back of my eyelids. I closed my eyes tighter. Everything looked gray with tiny flashing spots like a television without a signal. I shut my eyes even tighter and tried to project my sight out through my eyelids, through the ceiling and the roof and out into space, past the stars, past whatever was behind the stars, beyond any point my eyes could see when they were open, a point a zillion miles away, all the while trying to empty my mind, stop all thought, create a vacuum so something else could come in. There was blackness with drifting white spots, like blobs of milk floating in oil. I concentrated even harder and the white spots began exploding, like flashbulbs going off. And then suddenly, everything faded away and a scene appeared. A man and a woman and two kids were sitting at a wooden table in a small kitchen. The man had short dark messy hair and looked about thirty. He passed plates of food around. It looked like Europe, the doors had lever handles rather than knobs. The paint on the edges of the old wooden table was chipped. The woman’s mouth moved but I couldn’t hear her. The man looked up from his food when she began talking. The two kids were eating. Then the scene would fade away, and I was left with a strange feeling that what I’d seen was actually happening somewhere halfway around the world that very moment.

  [MAY 28, 1999]

  There were voices. I couldn’t tell what they were saying but I could distinguish the differing tones. Eventually I tried to open my eyes. It all appeared blurry, but as the scene came into focus I could see that I was surrounded. There must have been eight of them, wearing white coats, holding clipboards, leaning over the bed. Scribbling. Hovering, examining, peering. Whispering. Craning their heads. Like vultures, hyenas, waiting.

  I lifted my head slightly. They saw that, realized I was awake, and immediately stepped back. I tried to move, get up, but it seemed like I was being restrained somehow. Eventually I realized that it was only all the tubes and hoses that were stuck in me. There were a lot of them, up my nose, in my neck, my mouth, up my penis. I was lying on some sort of air cushion. There was the sound of a quiet motor whirring away from underneath me. Realizing I couldn’t go anywhere, I laid back and closed my eyes.

  I heard little fragments of what they were saying. “It was heroin,” one said. “Amazing,” said another, “that he’s even alive.”

  Then I remembered, and lifted my head. Both of my feet were still there.

  What are they doing there?

  Straining, I reached down with my hand to confirm what my eyes were telling me.

  That’s interesting. They must have forgot. Something must have distracted them in the O.R. Maybe a card game broke out. Texas Hold ‘Em. No limit. The anaesthesiologist was taking everyone’s money.

  “Mr. Hansen? Mr. Hansen?”

  I felt a hand on my shoulder, shaking me. Pinned to the chest of her white uniform was a nametag. Gretchen.

  ‘It’s time for your medication.”

  She was smiling, holding a little plastic cup. She was very pretty, blonde, with sparkling blue eyes.

  “Mmmm, hi,” I said.

  “Can you manage?” she asked, holding out the cup.

  “I think so,” I croaked.

  “What is it?”

  As soon as I saw the pink I knew what it was, I’d had it before. But I wanted to hear her say it.

  “It’s a Pain cocktail. Methadone...”, and on and on.... she listed about ten more things, but I wasn’t listening anymore. She put her hand behind my head, tipped it up.
It was gritty and thick, tasted like chalk and Pepto-Bismol mixed together. She picked up the chart from the end of the bed.

  “Can I look at that?” I asked, nodding, lifting my arm. It took a minute for my eyes to focus, then I scanned down to the bottom where the drugs were listed:

  Methadone, 80mg X 4/day. That’d been crossed out, replaced by 90mg X 4/day. 90 X 4...

  “360? That’s a lot.”

  “Yes,” she said seriously, “it is.”

  What? Am I hearing things? 9 times 4 equals 36, add a zero...

  Three Hundred and Sixty?

  I’d never even heard of anyone being on more than one hundred and twenty.

  Oh Gretchen. I love you.

  “How did they figure this?” I asked.

  “I think it was the screaming,” she said, “in post-op. That’s what I heard.”

  “Screaming?”

  “You woke up early, during the operation. Much earlier than you were supposed to. The doctors hadn’t even finished. You’re in the Intensive Care Unit.”

  [FALL 1973]

  My dad was home. He was sitting in the plush leatherette recliner, staring at the TV. He’d come home early from the bar and turned on The Lawrence Welk Show. He liked to watch the weird guy with the accordion, the champagne bubbles floating across the screen and especially the tap dancers. It reminded him of the old country. Or something.

  Last spring there’d been another accident. They’d dropped a crab pot over the side and some greenhorn had been about to get tangled up in the rope and pulled overboard. My dad had pushed him out of the way, the rope had gotten wrapped around his arm and he’d been yanked up into the air. His arm had gotten jammed where the rope goes playing out through the pulley but the rope had continued, tearing a good sized chunk of flesh out of his forearm. It was an ugly wound, about the size of a large lemon. I could see the muscles, the inner workings of his arm. He’d been lifted off the boat by a Coast Guard chopper, almost dumped out of the basket, flown to Anchorage, then back home where he spent a few weeks in the hospital. Mom had smuggled him in bottles of booze while he was there.