Memoirs Aren't Fairytales: A Story of Addiction

by Mann, Marni

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Finally, around two in the morning the doctor came into the waiting room and gave us the news on Sunshine's condition. He said when she came in, she was under cardiac arrest from overdosing on heroin. He injected her with Narcan, which reversed all the symptoms. Once she was stable, he took her into surgery and repaired her collapsed lung. Her kidneys were bruised, and her lip and forehead were stitched closed. He didn't say anything about the blood on her legs. But he said once she healed, she should have a full recovery. He told us she'd be in the hospital for about a week, and if we'd like to go see her, he'd give us a couple minutes.

  In the elevator, Claire warned me how bad she would look. Claire was right. I didn't recognize Sunshine. Most of her face was wrapped like a mummy, but her eyes were black and swollen. Her hair was a tangled mess, and her bangs were pink from the blood. There were tubes in her nose and an IV in her hand.

  Claire sat on the bed and rubbed Sunshine's leg. She was still asleep, but that didn't stop Claire from telling her how much we loved her and how we'd been praying. Maybe Claire had prayed, but I was still thinking about needles and how I was going to steal them from the hospital.

  “It's time for us to go,” Claire said.

  I was standing at the foot of the bed. In the corner of the room by the chair was a plastic bag and printed on the front were the words: Patient Property, Boston Medical.

  “I'll meet you in the lobby,” I said.

  When Claire left the room, I opened the bag and inside were her clothes and purse. I found her container of clean rigs and tucked it under my jacket. Just then, I heard someone coming down the hall and rushed back over to the bed.

  “She needs her sleep,” the nurse said from the doorway.

  I said goodbye to Sunshine, and Claire and I went back to the hotel.

  Sunshine was awake when we visited her the next afternoon. Her eyes looked more swollen than they had the night before, and her face was still wrapped in gauze. But she talked just fine and wanted to know if I'd scored any dope. I told her I'd gone to Richard's.

  “What happened to you last night?” Claire asked.

  Sunshine didn't answer right away. And when she finally responded, her words came out slow like she had to think first. She told us she was walking home from the store when some guy pulled her into an alley, put a gun to her head, and asked for all her money. She told him she only had a couple dollars, and he punched her in the face and knocked her to the ground. He beat her and kicked her in the stomach before leaving her there to die.

  “What did he look like?” I asked.

  “He had a mask on,” Sunshine said.

  “Did the police question you?” Claire asked. Sunshine nodded. “I didn't have nothing to tell them.”

  “Someone must have seen—”

  “It was dark and I didn't see nobody around,” Sunshine said.

  Claire turned in her chair to face me. “You need to be careful at night,” she said. “Those streets aren't safe.”

  Sunshine getting beat up wasn't going to keep me off the streets. If I didn't hook, I wouldn't have enough money for dope.

  I remembered then we were out of toilet paper and went into Sunshine's bathroom. I unraveled half the roll and stuffed the wad into my purse. When I came out, Claire was sliding our chairs away from the bed to the far wall.

  “Our conversation must have tuckered her out,” Claire whispered.

  The side of Sunshine's face was resting on the pillow and she was snoring. We left the hospital so she could get her sleep.

  Frankie came knocking on my door the next morning. He told me if I wanted to stay for the week, it was seventy-five bucks. I needed to either pay up or fuck him. Claire must have told him how long Sunshine was going to be in the hospital. The choice was easy to make. I didn't have any money to give him.

  When I first started tricking, I hated doing older men. Their skin was wrinkly and hairy, and they had bad breath. But I'd grown to really prefer them—even more than younger guys—because the sex didn't last very long. And if I were on top, that position made them bust real quick.

  I rode Frankie on the couch and he came within a minute. Before he left, he said he'd be back in a week to collect again.

  We visited Sunshine every afternoon and on the sixth day, the doctor let her go home. Claire got her settled in bed, and once she left to make dinner, Sunshine asked if I had any dope.

  “I'll spot you, but you owe me,” I said.

  I had enough smack for two more days. But if I had to feed her too, I'd be dry by morning.

  I dumped three bags on a spoon and heated it with a lighter.

  “Hurry up,” she said and searched her arms and legs for a vein. “The morph's wearing off.”

  She said the morphine IV they gave her in the hospital didn't get her high, but it kept her from being dope sick.

  “I've been dreaming about this shot,” she said. “The shit's been haunting me at night.”

  The only time I'd dreamt of heroin was during one of my nods, but I'd never gone more than eight hours without a shot. I also hadn't been doing smack for as long as she had.

  I filled the syringe and walked over to the bed. “You owe me,” I said again. Sunshine's memory wasn't too good.

  She found a vein on the back of her thigh and stuck it, but she hit muscle. “Will you stick me?” she asked, wiping the blood off the needle hole.

  I injected the vein, and she fell back against the pillow with her eyes closed. The purple bruises on her face were fading, and the swelling on her cheeks were going down. The stitches were still noticeable, but they were starting to dissolve too.

  She kicked off the blanket and I saw bruises on her inner thighs. I wondered if those were from the rape. She still hadn't said a word about it. Claire and I hadn't asked her either. When she was ready, she'd tell us.

  Since Sunshine's face and body were still bruised, we agreed not to trick until she was healed. To make money, we panhandled together. My jacket was too tight for a baby bump, so I changed my sign to read: Homeless and Hungry. We couldn't sit on the sidewalks or benches, since they were covered in snow. We used a milk crate to sit on, but it didn't fit us both so we took turns sitting down. I thought we'd make a lot of money panhandling in the winter, but people didn't seem to feel bad for us.

  We started tricking about a week after she got out of the hospital. The bruises on her face had turned yellow, but at night they were hard to see. We'd be lucky if we got one or two Johns the whole night, and usually they only wanted head. We charged twenty bucks for a blowjob, but we really made nineteen after the cost of the condom. Sunshine said the winter was the worst season for hooking. But come spring, we'd be making good money. Spring was five months away.

  If we were low on cash, we'd steal. We'd try all the door handles on the cars parked on the sides of the street. When we found one unlocked, we'd take everything—CD's, Walkmans, radar detectors—and bring it to the pawnshop. Sometimes we'd get a big score like a diamond ring or gold necklace, and those finds would buy us a whole day's worth of junk.

  One night, I was walking back to the corner after finishing a trick and saw a minivan parked in front of an apartment building. The guy was unloading a trunk full of boxes and electronics and kept the truck open while he brought the stuff inside. I wasn't too far from the hotel. If I could snatch something and bring it right home, I could sell it at the pawnshop in the morning. But I had to hustle. The guy only spent a few seconds in the lobby and came right back out to the van. I waited for him to take in his third load and then darted over to the van. There was a DVD player sitting on top of a box, and I grabbed it. When I got to the corner, I looked over my shoulder and he was chasing me.

  “You're dead!” he yelled.

  I booked it as fast as I could, trying not to trip over the mounds of snow. Up ahead, a woman was coming out the back door of a building and I slid inside before the door shut. I hid behind the set of mailboxes and peeked over the to
p. The guy was only a few feet from the door. His back was facing me, and he kept turning to the right and left like he was looking for me.

  “I know you can hear me,” he shouted. “If you come out now, I won't hurt you.”

  How could he hurt me? He didn't know where I was hiding, and the door to the building was locked.

  He turned towards me, but I ducked just in time. “That's my six-year-old son's DVD player.”

  A part of me felt bad for taking something from a six-year-old. But I could get thirty bucks for it.

  “Keep it, you piece of shit,” he shouted. “I hope you rot in hell.”

  He walked back in the direction he came. I stayed hidden behind the mailboxes for at least an hour. I wanted to make sure he was really gone and not waiting for me in a doorway or behind a dumpster.

  I sold the DVD player for twenty-five bucks. I would have gotten thirty if I'd stolen the remote too. I took the money and went to Richard's to re-up. I was doing all our dope buying since Sunshine had gotten out of the hospital. With both of us going to Richard's, we were wasting too much money on train tokens. So we bought an extra bag with the six bucks we saved in train fare, and while I was out buying, she went to the needle exchange.

  It was just after New Years when I met Heather at Richard's house. She had rotted teeth and red spidery veins on her face, and she was only nineteen. I'd sit and talk with her while I waited for Richard to finish banging one of his squatters. She was a tweaker who smoked and mainlined crystal meth. Her pupils were always dilated, and she'd pick the skin off her arms and legs, killing the bugs, she said, who were eating her skin. Most of the time, she talked about the police and how they were setting up a raid on Richard's house. She said she could hear the cops talking outside his windows. I never saw any cops when I came in or left. Heather was just paranoid, but that's what meth did to people. That crystal was some crazy shit.

  I told Heather about the DVD player I'd stolen and how the guy almost caught me.

  “Boost from stores,” she said. “That's what I do.”

  “But stores have cameras.”

  “If you have a receipt, it's harder for them to bust you.”

  She'd find receipts in trash bins, grab the items off the shelves, and return them for cash.

  So on my way back from Richard's, I decided to try it. I collected all the receipts I could find in the trash and sorted through them, looking for items I recognized like shampoo or soap. There was a receipt from CVS for vitamins and razor blades. I stashed the receipt in my pocket and went into the store. I took the vitamins and razor blades off the shelf and brought them to the checkout line. The clerk gave me cash, twenty-three dollars and change.

  I left CVS and went to Walgreens, returning baby formula and cough syrup. This was so much easier than stealing from cars. I could do it during the day when it wasn't so cold, and I didn't have to bargain with pawnshop owners for more money.

  But even after adding store boosting to my daily lineup of panhandling and tricking, Sunshine and I were still short on money. Between the two of us, we shot two hundred and fifty dollars worth of heroin a day, plus the two packs of cigarettes we smoked. If it weren't for Claire feeding us dinner, we'd never eat. I made pads out of wads of toilet paper instead of buying tampons. I washed my hair with the little bars of soap Frankie put in the rooms. I used the same soap to do laundry too and washed my clothes in the kitchen sink. We stole markers from Frankie and used them as eye shadow and liner and borrowed Claire's tweezers to pluck the hairs from our legs and armpits.

  Just when I thought the winter was behind us and tricking season was finally here, Boston was hit with a blizzard. When I woke up and looked out the window, there was at least three feet of snow. The streets weren't plowed, and the sidewalks weren't shoveled, and the snow was still falling. I turned on the news and it said all trains and taxis were shut down until further notice.

  “You ain't deaf, turn that shit down,” Sunshine said from her bed.

  I turned the volume up. “You need to see this.”

  She threw her pillow on the floor and sat up. “What's so damn important?” Her face froze when she saw the TV screen. “The trains are working, right?”

  “No, and the taxi companies are closed too.”

  She walked over to the window and held onto the ledge, pressing her nose against the glass. “Guess you'll be walking to Richard's.”

  “He lives a couple miles from here,” I said.

  “Then you better start walking.”

  “You know I can't go. It's too cold out there, and the sidewalks aren't cleared.”

  She sat on the edge of the bed and put her hands on her forehead. “How much dope you got?”

  “Three bags.”

  She emptied her purse on the floor, and only two bags fell out.

  “It's supposed to snow like this until Friday night,” I said.

  It was only Wednesday.

  When it came to snow storms, Boston wasn't like Bangor. Bangor had plows and places to dump the snow like fields and parking lots. Boston was all city. Even when it snowed only a few inches, the trains ran slow. It would take days for the city to move all this snow. I didn't have days. I only had a couple hours before I'd be dope sick.

  I cooked up Sunshine's dope and split it between two rigs. The shot didn't get me high. I didn't even feel a rush. A few hours later, we shot our last three bags and I didn't get high from that either. We usually shot three bags each, just to get straight. If we wanted to get really high, we'd shoot four.

  Sunshine stretched out on the bed, and I curled up on the couch with my eyes glued to the TV. I hadn't prayed when she was in the hospital, but I was praying now. But the forecast was only getting worse. Overnight, the snow was supposed to change to hail.

  When I was a senior in high school, some asshole had run a red light and smashed into the passenger side of my car. Seconds before he hit me, the accident played out in my head. I knew the crash was going to total my car and possibly even hurt me. Panic ran through me. My hands shook and I gripped the wheel so my face wouldn't slam into it.

  Withdrawal was like my car accident. Dope sickness was driving towards me. I could feel it, and I could see it coming when my hands started to shake. And because Sunshine had told me what to expect, I played out the next two days in my head. Cramps, vomiting, diarrhea, and it was all going to hurt. Really bad.

  Three hours after my last shot, the stomach cramps hit, like a combination of food poisoning and PMS. I tried to sleep it off, but when I closed my eyes, my head would spin. Sweat dripped down my forehead and soaked the pillow. The wet stain felt cool against my burning skin. Then I'd shake from the chills. The heroin gods were moving the thermostat from right to left every few minutes. I couldn't get warm enough and I couldn't cool down.

  Dope seeped out of my pours. I could smell the sweetness in my sweat and when I peed.

  The food I'd eaten the night before came up, and I ran to the bathroom to puke. My stomach gurgled, and diarrhea poured from my ass. I didn't know which end to put on the toilet. So when I had to do both at the same time, I leaned off the toilet and puked in the shower.

  From the bathroom, I heard Sunshine moaning and throwing up, spitting and then moaning again.

  “I need the toilet,” she yelled.

  There was no way I could get off the pot. She was throwing up in our only bucket, and that wouldn't cover both my ends.

  “I'm not done yet,” I said.

  “But I'm gonna shit in the bed.”

  Frankie would give us a change of sheets. But if I got sick on the couch, I didn't think he'd give us a new one.

  She came into the bathroom, stripped off her clothes, and squatted in the shower over my pile of puke.

  “What are you—”

  She added diarrhea to my puke pile. The sight and smell was too much for my stomach. I heaved into the shower and it splattered all over her feet. She barfed after I did and then cursed me out for making her throw up too.


  She ran the water in the shower to wash off her legs and feet, and then she left the bathroom. The water went down the drain, but nothing else would. I covered the clump of vomit and shit with toilet paper and then realized we only had half a roll left.

  I crawled out of the bathroom and into the bed. I was only on it for a second before she kicked my legs and pushed me to the ground.

  “What was that for?” I asked from the floor.

  “I ain't sharing the bed,” she said. “I'm too sick.”

  I looked over the edge of the bed. She was wrapped in a cocoon, and her head was buried in a mound of pillows. I didn't want to share a bed with her either, but the couch was wool, and my skin itched like the chicken pox.

  My upper body hurt worse than my lower half so I kneeled in front of the bed, resting my head and arms on the mattress. Her foot kicked my shoulder so hard I landed on the floor again.

  “Get the hell away,” she said. “Your smell is making me sick.”

  “You don't smell any better.”

  If I had more energy, I would have picked her up and thrown her on the ground. But I couldn't even crawl back to the couch, so I stayed on the floor and watched TV. Sunshine flipped through the stations. She'd settle on a movie and during the commercials, she switched to the news. I closed one eye, trying to ease some of the pressure building behind my lids. But then I saw two TV screens, and that made me dizzy.

  From the floor, the bathroom looked miles away. My bladder was full, but I didn't have the strength to crawl there. I peed right where I was. There was so much of it, and it was so warm, like I was taking a bath.

  When Claire came in, she helped me to the couch. She took off my wet shorts and put me in a pair of sweatpants. She fed me juice and tea and I puked them both up. After she rinsed out the bucket, she washed my face. The washcloth felt like needles scraping over my skin.

  “Don't. It hurts,” I said.

  “Poor thing,” she said. “I'll just sit with you, okay?” She reached for my hand and massaged my fingers. That didn't feel good either.