My Fair Junkie

by Amy Dresner

  She walks up and smiles and does a twirl.

  “Where are your pants, girl?” I ask.

  “Some Armenian bitch burnt them!”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “Are you Argentinian?” she asks.

  “No, I’m from here. Why?” I smile.

  “Because with your hair up like that… you look Argentinian.”

  “Thanks.” She is referring to my messy bun that keeps my long blond locks off my sweaty face and away from the street filth.

  She starts to ramble on about how she can feel people “meditate.” I just smile and laugh and pretend to understand. Then she gently touches my arm and prances off. My heart breaks a little.

  I remember the first time I did speed. I was twenty-four and had moved from L.A. to San Francisco on a whim, looking for answers. San Francisco—the city with the highest population of lost souls, transients, and fuck-ups. I don’t know why I thought salvation was being doled out on every corner there like some flyer for a free show, but I did. And I couldn’t have been more wrong.

  Driving up the I-5 from Los Angeles in my ’67 navy-blue Thunderbird with the Red Hot Chili Peppers blasting (fuck you, it was 1993—they were very cool then), I was trying desperately to convince myself that I was on the precipice of a life epiphany. This was a great—no, the great—new chapter in my life where that missing piece would be revealed, and everything would finally fall into place. On my drive, I got food poisoning from a tofu burger that had sat in my car for too long, and then I spent the night puking in a Motel 6. I tried not to let that spook me as a bad omen. I had decided this would be a vision quest. In retrospect, it was really just an alcoholic pulling a geographic.

  When I was fifteen or sixteen, my father, in an attempt to bring up his kid in Beverly Hills with “a sense of values,” had made a bet with me: if I didn’t smoke, drink, or do drugs before age eighteen, he’d give me $1,000. Yes, that’s how Jews raise their kids. Bribery.

  Drugs scared me. I’d always maintained they were a cop-out, a cheap escape from your own feelings, from real life. In college, I was disgusted when I came back to my dorm room one day to find my roommate and her bouncy sorority sisters snorting lines of coke off my laptop.

  By this point, my parents had already endured my eating disorders, clinical depression, and chronic unemployability punctuated with radically unrealistic career choices: actor, model, filmmaker. Since I hadn’t shown a predisposition toward drugs by twenty-four, I think they felt it a safe bet that they wouldn’t be one of my adventures in self-destruction.

  As I drove up north, I had this overwhelming feeling that I didn’t really know myself (as if we ever do). Had I been avoiding sex, drugs, and performing just because I was afraid? Or was I really not interested in these things? Fear and aversion can feel pretty similar.

  I had to find out who I was. But how do you do that? I decided I’d figure out who I was by figuring out who I wasn’t. It would be a process of elimination. I made a vow to myself. I would say yes to every experience that presented itself, no matter how much fear or aversion I had. I would embrace whatever came my way with gusto.

  I didn’t know a soul when I moved up north, nor did I have a job. But within a week, I had both. Cool. This new “throw yourself into it” thing was working for me.

  Excited, I called my father.

  “I got a job,” I said.

  “Oh yeah? Doing what, Ames?”

  “I’m working at a restaurant.”

  “Are you a hostess?”

  “No.”

  “Are you a waitress?”

  “Nope.”

  “I give up.”

  “I’m a dishwasher.”

  “Do they know you’ve washed about ten dishes in your whole fucking life?”

  Honestly, dishwashing turned out to be a pretty sweet gig. The place I worked was a tiny Italian bistro in the Upper Haight owned by a couple of queens, walking distance from my new pad. I would wash dishes in the back and watch TV while the owner’s boyfriend, Larry, cooked these fabulous pasta dishes. It was low stress except for this aggro lesbian who, for some mysterious reason, sneered at me and hated me from the moment I arrived.

  San Francisco in the early nineties was the opposite of Los Angeles. L.A. was all cookie-cutter beauty, fancy cars, and bling. S.F. was creative expression, drugs, and anti-capitalism. There, panhandling was cool. It’s the pride of the underdog. I’m pretty sure half the scruffy kids with lip rings begging for change on the Haight had college degrees and middle-class parents. But—hey, man—they were bucking the system, choosing freedom over corporate America. And they did seem free, and I envied them for it.

  A month or two in, it was obvious I needed a second job. There were lots of opportunities if you could cocktail or waitress, but I’d never done either. I am incredibly clumsy and have never been able to do the standard restaurant thing—balance three plates on an arm or even one tray topped with fancy drinks. But one day strolling down the Haight, I saw an Ethiopian restaurant. I noticed that African food is served on a single manhole-size plate, and a single plate I could carry! I filled out an application and, miraculously, was hired. I quickly became the highest-tipped waitress there, though I have to be honest, only because I was funny. Even with just one plate to balance, agile I was not.

  One evening, exhausted from my afternoon dishwashing shift, I was worrying how I’d get through my waitressing shift. My neighbor offered me a line of some pinkish powder, saying it would give me energy. Without much thought, I snorted it. It burned like fire. I went to work, and soon I was shaking, overly energized and not a little bit irritable. I vowed never to do the stuff again.

  Fast forward a few months. I was deep in the local spoken-word scene, where the poets had nicknames like “Stinky,” “Mike Prophet,” and “Dick Ranger,” and most were junkies, tweakers, and/or alcoholics. I was drinking. A lot. I was primarily living off a small trust fund that my grandfather had left me. But nobody around me had money, so I pretended I didn’t have any, either. I wore long skirts, ratty T-shirts, and sandals. I sported toe rings, greasy hair, and wooden beads.

  One night at this dive bar where we all read bad poetry, I was again offered a line of speed, and for some reason, I took it. But this time, it made me feel different. Years of self-hatred and anxiety instantly vanished. I felt like it was okay—good, even—to be me. This is what I had been chasing with decades of therapy and psychiatric meds. And here it was: Prozac… with wings! Synthetic self-esteem and bliss. From that moment, I was hooked. Who wouldn’t be?

  I began to snort speed daily, and within seven short months, I was completely strung out. I never saw it coming.

  It’s like bingeing on food. You don’t gain weight overnight. You wake up months later and you’re like: holy shit, I’m fat. It’s the same with drugs. You don’t become a drug addict overnight. Months go by, and you wake up one day and you’re like: holy shit, I’m a tweaker.

  Substance abuse was unknown territory for me. I hadn’t even ever been around drug addicts. I thought I was just a tourist in druggyland, visiting, experimenting… even if that experimenting was all day every day. I was lying to myself, but I didn’t realize it till years later. Or maybe I knew, but I wanted to believe the lies. Same difference.

  I had been living in Cole Valley at the time, renting a room from a husky redhead who fancied herself a musician but tended bar to pay the bills. She was adamantly against hard drugs but drank like a sailor and smoked pot like a hippie. The apartment always stank like my Nag Champa incense and her shitty cheap perfume.

  One day, she frowned at me from across the living room, and then asked, “Are you high?”

  I was busted, and instead of being cool, I got rabidly defensive.

  “You first. Are you fucking high?” I fired back.

  “You’re on speed,” she said. “I’m just stoned.”

  “Ooh, the devil’s lettuce,” I mocked, the speed spurring me on. “Yes, pot is just an herb! In fact,
it’s God’s medicine!”

  She just stared at me, speechless.

  I glared back at her and then continued, “Oh, give me a fucking break! We’re both on drugs, okay?” I was high and angry, and the words came out like bursts from a machine gun.

  “You need to move out,” she announced calmly.

  “My fucking pleasure!” And with that, I stomped into my bedroom and slammed the door.

  In my room, I laid out some thick lines and snorted them. I counseled myself, “Stay high. Stay numb. Don’t freak out.” Then I heard one of her many boyfriends come in. Some whispering. Then fucking. She let out little yelps as her stupid red head banged against the wall.

  “Fucking whore,” I said aloud.

  Within a week, I moved to Lower Haight, across from the projects, into a three-bedroom place with skinheads and gutter punks. We all paid rent, but it felt more like a flophouse.

  My drug habit quickly escalated in this new habitat, and it became increasingly apparent that I needed to start buying my own stash instead of mooching off my junkie roommates. I remember the first time I copped. There was this Venice gangster named Blade, a massive white dude with long, thick dreadlocks. He spoke slowly, like an old-school cowboy, using words sparingly, as if each one cost him money. He sold guns and weed but was known to be able to get anything.

  “I want speed,” I said, trying to sound casual.

  “I don’t deal that shit. It’ll kill you,” he said flatly.

  “Oh,” I said, dejected.

  “I know somebody. They’ll call.”

  As I started to thank him, he hung up. Evidently I was too polite for the drug trade.

  A few hours later, somebody was at my place handing me a quarter bag of crystal meth. He was in a dark hoodie, and he looked pissed off.

  “Hold on,” I said. I left him standing in the empty living room as I took the small plastic bag of grimy powder around the apartment, showing it to my roommates. Does this look like good quality stuff? Is this a fat quarter? I was clueless.

  The guy looked irritated but said nothing. He took my money and left.

  The phone rang. It was Blade. “Listen, you’re a little green. I’m gonna hook you up with this girl who slings crystal. Name’s Belinda. I think she’ll be a better fit.” Later, I found out that the guy wanted to beat the fuck out of me, but Blade stepped in. Apparently, there was also some talk of kidnapping me and selling me into the sex trade. Honestly, I was kind of flattered.

  Belinda was a bosomy Goth girl with translucent skin and jet black hair. She had a very relaxed demeanor for a speed freak, but her house reeked of “tweaker”—clutter everywhere: shit she’d found, was collecting, refinishing, fixing. The land of broken toys.

  I’d call her regularly from a pay phone, with the usual coded question to see if she was holding: “Are you on the program?”

  Every now and then, she and her boyfriend would clean up, and I’d be forced to find another source.

  “Oh, no. I don’t do that anymore. Speed is evil. It’s bad for your heart. You should quit.”

  “Whateverrrrr.” I’d hang up, annoyed. Luckily, she never stayed clean for long. Within weeks, she’d be dealing again.

  The shithole where I lived got creepier and more crowded as it became the hangout/shelter for the local homeless druggies. There was an alcoholic marine who got so shit-faced, he fell through our glass coffee table. There was a speed freak named Bicycle Bob, who had Graves’ disease and always rode a bicycle. He had a long, narrow face and bulging eyes. One day he got hit by a truck and split his head open. Hospital stapled it back together. Next thing I know he was “recuperating” on our couch for a week, like a bug-eyed druggy Frankenstein.

  My least favorite person was this guy known as Dancin’ Dick Dorsey. His skin had that green hue not uncommon to chronic drug addicts. He spoke quickly, with conviction, like a TV minister, and always wore a long black trench coat. We hated each other. I knew he was an evil sociopath, and he knew I was a fraud—some trustafarian masquerading as a tough girl junkie.

  My favorite housemate was Stinky, a self-loathing geek with short, bleached-blond hair, oversize Buddy Holly glasses, and a big bone through his septum. We had the same birthday, though he was a year younger, and I felt a deep kinship with him. Like Stinky, I felt broken, ugly, and unwanted. I just didn’t wear those sentiments on the outside. Stinky, however, tried to look as hideous as possible. His body was a billboard for all his negative feelings about himself, with ridiculous tattoos, cut marks, and repulsive piercings. His life revolved around comic books, fucking fat girls, and speed. He was always broke—but ever innovative. There was a bar near our place that had a “ladies’ night” when girls drank for free. Stinky would dress up in drag, handcuff himself to the bar, and get his drink on. He didn’t care. In fact, I think he enjoyed being humiliated.

  One night, I was at a house party in Upper Haight. All the poets and spoken word people were there, including a buff UPS worker who liked to play guitar in a tutu and went by the stage name “Captain Magliano.” I thought he was an idiot, but we had hooked up a few times. I’d been high, and it was hard to say no to a body like his, even if he had a personality like a windy tunnel. Making matters worse, he was Catholic, extremely chauvinistic, and really angry that he was attracted to a mouthy Jew like me.

  On this particular night, I was very drunk. I turned toward the door just as Stinky walked in, wearing a scoop-neck black Freddie Mercury–like leotard, miniskirt, heels, and long white gloves. He was covered in silver glitter. His eyes and chest sparkled like broken glass in the low light. He looked completely androgynous, and he was, for the first time, astonishingly beautiful. And he knew it.

  “Can I talk to you for a second?” I asked him innocently.

  “Sure.”

  I lured him into the bathroom and immediately locked the door behind us and shoved him against the wall.

  “You look so fucking hot,” I said. And with that, our mouths met, and we began furiously kissing and violently grappling at each other. Five minutes later, we walked out of the bathroom like nothing happened. We never spoke of it.

  One night, Dancin’ Dick took Stinky out to a strip club to see some titties and let him shoot speed for the first time. Of course, like the novice he was, Stinky shot the whole quarter out of the gate and immediately went into amphetamine psychosis. Convinced that the stripper’s flower was miked, he jumped onto the stage to try to dismantle it. He and Dancin’ Dick were quickly kicked out of the club, at which point Dancin’ Dick just parked Stinky outside our door and took off. Yep, Stinky was our problem now: paranoid, hyper, talking a mile a minute about nothing.

  I stripped him down to his boxers. As I pulled off his T-shirt, I saw “bed-wetter” crudely tattooed on his back.

  “When did you get that?!” I asked in horror.

  “I can hear the cops. Don’t you hear the helicopters? They are coming!” His speech was pressured, like he couldn’t get the words out of his mouth fast enough. And his eyes—they were huge and shiny and black like marbles.

  I tucked him into my bed.

  I tried to sound stern and convincing. “I’m going to the store. Don’t fucking move.”

  “Watch out for the pigs. They’ve bugged everything.” His hands were flying around him like little birds.

  “I’ll do that, Stinky.”

  Returning from the store, as I approached the apartment, I noticed that “HELTER SKELTER” had been freshly painted in red on the front window… from the inside.

  Fuck.

  I walked in the door, and the smell to which I’d grown immune suddenly hit me: moldy carpets, stale dishes, dirty laundry, and the slow decay that accompanies addiction.

  “Stinky?” I called to him.

  I turned the corner into the living room to see Stinky standing there. He was clad only in black patent leather high heels, fishnet stockings, and women’s red lace underwear. He was clutching an unplugged electric carving knife.
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  “Come get me, you fucking pigs! I’m ready for you!” he yelled.

  “Nobody is fucking coming,” I said, irritated. “Jesus. Please get in bed.” I gently took the carving knife from his hand and led him back into my bedroom.

  His psychosis lasted for weeks. I was worried he wasn’t going to come out of it. There was a guy on the scene who had done acid once and had a psychotic break. He had become really fucking weird ever since—still sweet, but kind of permanently out to lunch. After a few days, I let Stinky go back to work at the underground bookstore, the local poet hangout. Every night for weeks he’d come home and report on all the unmarked cars that had followed him throughout the day.

  You’d think watching somebody lose their mind right in front of you might be enough to put you off drugs forever. It wasn’t. In my defense, and I’m no geneticist, but I think there was a biological element to my immediate and unmitigated adoration of speed. I eventually discovered that my mother had been addicted to amphetamines for fifteen years, starting when she was a young model. They were given to her to help keep her weight down. And then there was my uncle, her schizophrenic brother, who had been a meth freak for the majority of his life. I’m not pawning it all off on biology. There was definitely a psychological hook as well. I can only describe the sensation of being high on speed for me as “coming home,” a feeling of sweet relief, like I’d been psychically drowning for years and had just stumbled across a pharmaceutical life raft. Granted, that life raft was pinkish white powder that came in small zip-locked bags, but it still felt like salvation to me. And I wasn’t giving it up without a fight.