by Adam Klein
‘Ellen asked me to wait and got out of the car, and I think that’s when it turned bad for me, when I saw the way she approached him and how the anger in his face was changing already. It was settling the way mine had when she first told me about the two of them. She had an art for overriding your first instincts. You had to accept her. You had to forgive her. I knew if he hadn’t forgiven her just then, he would eventually.’
I remember the state car I borrowed. Of course, it was desperation rather than mischief that motivated me. Perhaps it was more than mischief that motivated Ellen.
I started working for the state of California in 1983, in the same office where Bill worked before he died. I hadn’t met Victor yet. Janine and I had been dancing for almost two numb years after Bill overdosed. We were addicted to the money and drugs. And then the numbness started to hurt. Janine got out, and I knew I needed to. Everyone knew me at the office; I lived with Bill for almost six years. Maybe they pitied me after he died, but they moved my application through, and before I knew it I was interviewing before the panel. I told them I had volunteer experience, lies that Bill had tutored me with. I sold them on my sensitivity, high enough to talk about pain without feeling it.
When I started the job, I had less than a week clean, detoxing from heroin. My body was discharging emotion, the stored feelings of a three-month binge, and I could feel tears welling, prompted by the simplest things. When I did cry, it was over foolish things: a television special on young offenders – a fifteen-year-old boy who’d shot and killed his whole family after exhibiting years of bizarre, frustrated behavior. I remember the dramatic re-creation of his driving around the block all night, not really planning the massacre, but letting the voices speak. Then, one early morning before work, the second part of Sybil was broadcast, and I wept bitterly when Sally Field asked if she could sit with Joanne Woodward in her big chair. Because I wanted that too. I wanted someone to say, ‘You can just be with me,’ the way Bill had once said it.
I spent my first week on the state job anxious; my limbs felt heavy and dulled as though blood had stopped coursing through them. At night I would sit wide awake with clothespins clamped to the skin between my fingers, so I could feel them. Everything smelled wrong, tasted wrong. Toothpaste would sicken me. Significance was drained from everything, even the job, though I thought of it as my last chance. Attempting it clean seemed impossible; I was thrown into sharp contrast with the world of non-users, their pinkish, flushed faces and bright eyes – like rabbits blissfully at a carrot. I, on the other hand, a scurvy bird, the blue veins under the scars on my arms, the morning worm I would go at with the needle.
To make matters worse, they sent me on a training out of town during my second week, and I was forced to share a ride and a hotel room with Leslie, a well-dressed and stiffly coifed exercise enthusiast who carried free-weights in her suitcase. It was on my way to training, under a hot white sun like a doctor’s lamp, when I felt stricken by the smell of dope, a hallucination engineered by the hungry cells of my body, an amber mirage. I tried to reason it away, telling myself I could crave it without acting on it, wisdom I’d picked up in the jostling line at the methadone clinic. But the charade felt pointless. I would never have anything in common with Leslie. I saw myself like the rotten-toothed junkies I copped with, their faces as empty as the hotel rooms they’d float in and out of, as dirty and lifeless as the makeshift curtains left tacked and hanging in their windows. But people had always commented on how pretty I was, and, after Bill, men had been willing to pay for it, even when my life and my features got ugly.
I put my feet up on the dashboard. Leslie drove the state rental car. Leslie did the driving because I didn’t have a license – another thing I couldn’t manage. There had always been time and money enough for drugs, but what most people considered necessities eluded me. I always thought myself a functional addict. I’d survived, I’d even come to think myself sharp. But the little things made me reconsider.
The windows were rolled down and a cool wind buffeted the car. The highway rolled out on a thin, finger-like landmass that cut between what seemed like two oceans, but Leslie called the Bay. I had my eyes closed; I was counting days, hours, minutes clean. It would take months of this misery before I’d trust myself, wouldn’t fear a strong wind from an opened door that would carry me off. I thought of horror movies I’d seen – Rosemary’s Baby and Demon Seed – and how those women were overtaken by outside forces, impregnated by them, and ultimately became their vehicles. That was heroin. I knew that no amount of psychic fortification could prepare me for the smell of it, the discovery of a balloon they sold it in, the sight of a dealer; any association could leave me hunched around the needle. I looked at the confident profile of my co-worker, feeding plant-like on the sun spread over the hood and glass of the automobile. I pushed my sunglasses up, my pupils making my head throb, gorged with light.
‘I hear there’s a Nautilus center we can use as residents of the hotel,’ Leslie said.
I almost sighed aloud. ‘I’m still trying to kick this flu,’ I lied. ‘I don’t think I should exert myself.’
‘Maybe you can just steam or sauna. That always helps me.’
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to do it. It was my arms. There’d be no excuse for them. ‘I don’t think so,’ I said, looking out over the water, deep and full of its own unseen life.
We stayed in what looked like chalets off the highway, each with a peaked roof, loft, living room, and kitchen. I insisted upon the upstairs loft with its own attached bathroom – I thought I’d be more alone that way in case I suffered an anxiety attack, a bout of nausea – but I was almost too exhausted to move my bags upstairs, a small duffel and a larger shoulder bag. I fell heavily on the large bed, its crisp, clean bedding reminding me of my mother’s hospital bed. I’d learned from my father she’d come out of the anesthesia with half of her face and body paralyzed. He wrote that she’d panicked, and no one was there beside her.
I wondered if that would be my fate, that aloneness, that panic. Drugs made me superstitious. I was certain my bad fate accumulated around my wrongdoings. I left her in the hospital. I felt the old panic creeping over me. I turned the lamp off and picked up the phone. I didn’t know who to call; I’d been isolated for so long. I called Janine. She got clean over a year before and wrote a play that had some success, putting some of her old stripper friends into the roles she’d written, her plots often loosely based on their experiences. They’d called the work ‘daring,’ but I knew how sedate it was compared with the experiences that informed it.
I remember our last night using together, and I’m pretty sure that had been the decisive night she got clean. We finished a shift at the O’Farrell and decided to do a late-night private show at the Kearny Street Holiday Inn. Extra money, we thought, since we’d already spent a good $700 between ourselves that night. The guy had propositioned us at the club, and we agreed to meet him after our shift.
When we got to his room, we went directly to the bathroom and locked the door. I pulled out my ‘coffin,’ the syringe I kept prepared in a toothbrush case. Something I’d picked up from Bill, and I would always think of him when I saw it, until I’d fixed. Then I could forget anyone.
‘We’re prettying up,’ I told the man anxiously turning the knob. ‘Just leave us alone for a minute.’
I stood in front of the mirror and looked at my bee-stung arms, my sunken chest, the spots where the makeup was too heavy hiding the places where I’d missed, an abscess on my arm that couldn’t be covered. I pulled the belt tightly around the other arm but still had to try several times before finding a vein.
‘The light’s really good in here,’ I told Janine after I found it. She’d already shot up and was throwing up in the toilet.
I braced myself on the countertop. In just a few moments I was able to rinse out the syringe, pull a tube of lipstick from my purse, and draw some color onto my lips.
Janine couldn’t leave the bathroom, so
I did it alone.
I remember him sweating. He’d been watching videos and free-basing for hours. His lower jaw was swollen from a rotten tooth he was continually grinding and sucking at. I was glad his dick was soft and already rubbed raw. He couldn’t take his hand off it, except to replace it with the pipe, or to hold the instruments he put inside me. He’d been up for so long, he lost sight of the whole picture and began micro-managing everything. He was investigative about my cunt, his head between my legs for what felt like forever, not pleasing me, not eating me, but looking, trying to find the kitten trapped in the well.
I had quit smoking, but took a cigarette from his pack beside the bed, staring at the cottage cheese ceiling of this ugly room that felt like a clinic.
When I got Janine home that night, I had to strenuously remove her clothes and shoes. She looked like a traumatized child carried from a refugee center, or led away from a scene of grisly, motiveless violence. She called the next day to tell me she’d decided to take her mother’s offer of a private rehab. After six months in the program, I heard she moved in with her mother, a psychotherapist whose home and practice were in Marin, in a gorgeous cottage with Spanish tiles and leather furniture and glass doors that took in an expanse of hillside greenery and the ocean. Janine called it the Summer House after Jane Bowles’s play. That’s where she finished her own play, recounting her past at a much safer distance than time alone would permit.
I called her from the hotel room in Sacramento. I could hear Leslie unpacking her things downstairs, and cupped the receiver. I suppose I wanted to ask what had happened to Janine on our last night together that had transformed her, what had enabled her to get clean. I wanted to know what kept me from making that same change. I’d heard sobriety was a spiritual thing, and since I’d never had a religious experience when I was younger and more deserving of it, I certainly didn’t think it was in my cards. I told her about the job I’d started.
‘I’ll be working with offenders, helping them find jobs and counseling.’
‘Are you clean?’ she asked. Smug, bright confidence.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Of course.’ A part of my mind locked on the idea that I would cop, somehow or another, once I got off the phone with her.
‘How long?’ she asked.
‘It’s been a few months,’ I answered. I knew the lie was unimpressive to Janine. She’d once said clean time wasn’t the same thing as recovery. I guess I wasn’t at the point of teasing out those differences. I’d only quit the O’Farrell a week before I started the state job, and I did a lot of drugs that night. A lot.
Janine’s recovery, I told myself, could only be a distant inspiration, a curiosity.
‘I feel like you’ve put a curse on me,’ I said abruptly.
‘What are you talking about?’ she asked uncomfortably, as though a part of her anticipated this.
‘I saw your play. I knew it was me you were writing about – the girl who can’t get clean, who kills herself.’
‘It’s all a composite,’ she said. Rehearsed little bitch.
Now she sounded just like a customer, I thought; all the girls are interchangeable.
‘If you’re going to condemn someone like that,’ I said, choking out the words, ‘you might as well be honest about it.’
‘I’m sorry you heard it like that,’ she said.
I hung up. As long as I’d known her, she would write things down in a pad she kept, phrases, observations, street names, stripper names. I found it irritating, another way that she tried to see herself as separate from the things she did and the people she did them with. Perhaps it was a kind of narcissism that got her clean, a belief that her experience could amount to something, regardless how fractured and pointless it looked while she collected it. In either case, she pieced together the identifiable, exhumed fragments of the girls she ran with, distortions she called drama.
Then my mind raced to plan a trip back to San Francisco so I could see my dealer. My drama. Not worthy of notation. But it was already evening, and the ride was a good three hours. I’d have to come back the same night to make it to the morning training. I wondered if there was some way to get the rental car from Leslie.
I hated Janine. I hated everyone who talked about me as though I didn’t have the language down. Talk over your head, that’s what they did.
Leslie’s radio played downstairs. I felt nervous confronting her for the keys, but I was so determined I didn’t bother to construct a good reason for needing them. She came out of her bathroom with a jogging suit on, and patted the edge of the bed where she wanted me to sit. She drew matching pink sweatbands over her wrists.
‘I need the keys to the state car,’ I said.
‘You don’t have a license, Carrie.’ She sounded exasperated.
‘Yes, I do,’ I said grimly. I was preparing myself for further interrogation, to be asked to show the damned thing.
‘You told me you didn’t have one. That’s why I drove up here. That’s why the car is in my name. I can’t let you take it.’
‘I’m just going to get some groceries.’
‘Well, Luis is getting groceries later. Why not ride with him?’
I wanted to punch her. I wanted to scream, Can’t you see I’m falling apart. I’m sweating and I’m freezing and I’m so anxious I’d cut my own throat just to get some feeling hack in my body!
‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘It’s not that important.’ After she went out to the gym, I searched her room and grabbed the keys from the top drawer of her nightstand. I found where she’d parked the car, then I got in and started the drive back to the city.
I clenched the wheel, accelerated. I left Sacramento. I left a job, a chance, the painful resolve to get clean and live with myself. I cried as I drove. They were the same meaningless tears that welled from nowhere. I could hear Leslie talking with the others, anxious about the car she signed for, perhaps calling the San Francisco office. My mind was so cluttered with irrational thoughts, I imagined driving to another state, another life. I rolled down the window and momentarily felt an inexplicable freedom, and the tears rolled from my cheeks. It was a freedom so circumscribed, it allowed no fear. It was the simple choices allotted an addict making her way from point A to point B. I’d have to stop to cop, and get gas, and then, maybe then, I could keep driving.
I remembered the documentary on young offenders, the boy who drove around the block before entering his family’s home and killing them all. The rage he must have felt. For a moment, I saw my parents behind the life I was living. I would never escape them, no matter how fast I drove, no matter how much heroin I could afford. The quiet tragedy and excruciating effort of my mother to navigate the world, the cell my father cleaned up in. I could feel their mistakes replicating in me – a fate of bad genes, sick blood, memory.
Bill said we were like a family – all the people we’d see outside his hotel window – selling syringes for a dollar a pop, selling dope, our bodies. We treated each other just like the families we’d come from, carelessly, with as few words as possible. A meeting of needs. He thought junkies were better than that; that their weakness should make them more compassionate. He had a great, naive heart. But I think he first learned how to love by counting on me. And wasn’t it our desperation that made our love genuine and stronger than both of us? Wasn’t our wish to make life bearable for one another a true thing?
I remembered my father holding my mother, their bedroom door open and light falling over them like dust. Sick light. Canal light. I saw them from the kitchen; I was standing underneath the fly strips and a fluorescent ring. ‘Don’t worry,’ he intoned, more tender than I’d ever seen him. I wasn’t sure if it was my awkwardness or his that I was feeling. I knew my jealousy, though. I hoped my mother was dying, but that seemed impossible. I took her life for granted the way she had. Who cares what she needed? She manufactured need. It was the milk she weaned me on, laced with drugs.
I thought of Josephine, my dealer. I’d seen her last C
hristmas, the only person on the gauntlet, the strip of Mission Street from 16th to 21st where I’d cop. I almost gave up until I saw her – recognized her gait – the way she moved on her cane. I saw her emerge through the fog, an apparition, death on bad legs. She invited me to her hotel room, something she hadn’t done before. But she was alone, and she could tell I’d take her up on it. She offered a bag of spice drops. ‘Hard on my teeth,’ she said, revealing mostly gums. ‘But I can’t resist them.’ Of course not.
‘This time of year I always think of my children,’ she said. She used the small lid from a bottle to cook her dope and used the wax from her ear to keep the syringe plunger from sticking. She laughed at the appalled look I gave her.
‘They took my little girls away. They were so smart.’ She moved one hand down to the height of her bed. ‘They were only this tall. They were like tiny ladies. They didn’t even cry when they got taken.’
Whenever Josephine sold me drugs on the street, she crossed herself. She was superstitious, like most helpless people. When she’d cross herself, it always made me feel looked after too. I remember once when I told her I was getting clean, and not to call me, and not to expect me. ‘That’s really good, Carrie,’ she said. And she meant it, though she had probably witnessed it a thousand times before, had probably said the same things herself, though not recently. On Christmas night, I stayed with her until 4 A.M. The door was busted and a few people from the hotel came in throughout the night, either not acknowledging the holiday or making the best effort at cheer. Josephine, like her little girls, didn’t let on that anything was out of the ordinary, that a huge part of her had been torn out.
Please be home, Josephine, I thought, and before me the carnival lights of the Bay Bridge rose up over a black mirror of water. The lights were like tracks on the darkness, illuminating the narrow way. I felt suddenly convulsive, my body responding to the thought of drugs with an anxious nausea, and I clenched the wheel, heaving, my eyes tearing. Then suicide, like a second strand of lights, a shadow strand, rose up in me with the irresistible pull of my drug thoughts. I could go over the edge of the bridge so easily. And it would be black and silent for the Poison Girl.
