He had to get fixed.
Even more incredibly, I knew Brandon had been doing heroin on occasion. Because I was doing it with him! I just didn’t think it was that big of a deal, and I never imagined that it was seriously out of control. Although, looking back on even my brief exposure to the drug, I should have known.
I had always sworn I would never do heroin. My dad was a heroin dealer, I thought. I know exactly what that drug is about. No need to go there. I’d also watched one of my best friends in college get strung out in the months leading up to graduation, with her boyfriend, a governor’s son. She left suddenly and went to rehab and I never saw her again. Her experience gave me a chance to re-swear that I would never do heroin. And I didn’t.
Until one night when Brandon and I are hanging out with Corey, a chef friend of ours whom I know from Salt Lake. He and Brandon are working in the same restaurant and have struck up a friendship over food and—I am about to find out—much, much more.
We are crowded into my tiny room, which is not much more than a futon with a moat around it, drinking beers, trying to figure out our next move for the night. I go to the fridge to get another beer and when I come back, Brandon is wearing his roller skates. (When he isn’t riding his bike around, he’s wearing his roller skates. The man just loves wheels. All kinds of them.)
“I’ll be right back,” he says, giving me one of his sexy-devil-troll grins. He rolls out the door and, presumably, into the elevator.
I look at Corey. “Where’s he going?”
“He’ll be back in a minute.” Corey smiles like the Mona Lisa, which is his version of doing the Snoopy Dance. He’s not real big on emotion.
While Brandon’s gone, Corey and I talk a little about our mutual friends and the Salt Lake diaspora—everyone with any ambition at all leaves, unless they’re Mormon—marveling at how many of us have ended up in New York. In six minutes flat, Brandon whizzes back into the room.
“That was fast,” I say. I really cannot imagine where he went. I’m thinking maybe he got a bottle of champagne or something.
Instead he pulls a handful of tiny little squares of wax paper out of his satchel. There are maybe four or five of them and they look kind of beautiful, the type of thing you would find at a high-end stationery store packed with beautiful, but extravagantly unnecessary, things.
“What’s that?”
“You’ll see,” Brandon says, unfolding one of the envelopes. It’s like a teeny-tiny gift. I figure there must be something really good inside.
He opens it. It’s a white powder, no more than a teaspoon. He dumps it onto one of my glass picture frames and starts arranging it into tiny—by cocaine standards—lines, each about an inch and a half long and as wide as a piece of yarn.
Twenty-seven years of saying I’ll never do heroin instantly evaporates.
Gone.
Brandon pulls out a straw cut to one-quarter its original length. I should have wondered where this straw suddenly came from. I don’t. I am too busy watching Brandon sniff a line up his nose. Corey is next.
“I want to do it!” It’s the almost-bratty pleading of a younger sister, eager to do whatever it is that the big boys are doing. Corey hands me the straw.
“Take it easy,” he says. He smiles, bigger this time. Not only is the drug hitting his brain, but he’s also introducing me to something he knows is going to make me feel a way I’ve never, ever felt before.
Pain-free. Sublime. Out of this world.
And there’s a power in that. Like giving a girl her first (penis-induced) orgasm.
I take the straw in my hand and inhale. I’ve snorted something up my nose a thousand times before—I had that semiserious coke phase in Salt Lake—so the sensation of a narcotic powder burning through my nasal cavity is like a familiar road I haven’t been on in a long time. But this time that road leads somewhere completely new, like a dream where you’re at your house but it’s really, say, Margaret Thatcher’s. And in this case, Margaret Thatcher’s house is…awesome.
My first thought: I never knew how much pain I had in my body until it was gone.
My second thought: Why is everyone so afraid of this drug?! It’s not that big a deal.
My third thought: When can I do this again?!
Here’s what those two little lines feel like: the complete cessation of any anxiety, worry, or fear about myself, my life, my past, or my future. All while being completely lucid. I thought heroin was going to be like LSD, where grape jelly would be dripping down the walls and people’s faces would melt. But my mind is clear, perfectly clear. Clear as a bell.
I lay back on my crappy futon and contemplate the feeling I’m having, really meditate on it. I am floating on a cloud, but it’s not airy, it’s firm, like one of those Tempur-Pedic mattresses. It conforms perfectly to my body—I’m enveloped by it as it exerts the perfect amount of counterpressure to make me feel fully supported and secure yet not squeezed at all.
When I describe this to a therapist, years later, he nods knowingly. “Sounds like what it feels like to be held as an infant,” he observes. And it’s true. Heroin is like going back to infancy, only this time, my needs are being met. I’m safe, and I’m not hungry, and I’m feeling no discomfort.
On second thought, maybe I better not do this again.
But of course, I do. A few more times. It’s called “chipping,” where you do just the right amount, just as often as you can without getting addicted. What I find out is that this amount is shockingly small. Apparently recreational heroin is the same as casual sex. Which is to say, it doesn’t stay casual for long.
For me it is three times in one week. Sunday night, then Thursday night, then I used the leftovers on Friday. On Monday I wake up with the worst “flu” I’ve ever had. For the next several days I am the sickest, sickest, sickest I’ve ever been. I can’t even look at food. I ache, I am nauseous, I have the chills, I can’t move, and I want to die.
Die.
By that time one of my dad’s posse members, Cadillac, is living in New York to pursue his acting career, after getting a series of parts in August Wilson plays that ended up on Broadway. Cadillac regularly takes me to dinner, just to keep an eye on me. He’s the one who tells me what is wrong with me, a week into my “flu.”
“What’s the matter with you, Tracy? You’re not hungry?” he says. I’m only picking at my chicken Caesar salad.
“I don’t feel good.” I decide to leave it at that.
“You sick?” He’s eyeing me. Have you ever tried to get anything over on a fifty-seven-year-old former hustler? You can’t.
“Kind of.” I make eye contact with him. I’m trying to figure out if I can level with him. I think I can. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Of course, baby,” Cadillac says sweetly. Like my dad, he’s a little bit of a flirt. “You ask right ahead.”
“Well…” I hesitate. “What do you do when you’ve been doing something you know you shouldn’t be doing?”
“Like what?” He stares lasers at me. “What you been doing?”
I don’t even fool around. I just come out with it. “I did heroin a few times. And now I feel like shit.”
Cadillac gets this look on his face. Like it all makes sense now. “You achey? Sick feelin’?”
I nod.
“And you can’t eat?”
I nod again.
“That’s a jones, baby. You jonesin’.” There’s no judgment in his voice, which is a relief. He’s just communicating a fact.
Shit. Right. Of course! That’s what this is! It’s one of those times where I know something is right the moment I hear it, even though I would never think of it on my own.
“Fuck! Are you serious? I only did it three times! I, I mean, three times in one week,” I stammer. “I mean I’ve been doing it a little bit here and there—”
“That’s all it takes,” Cadillac says knowingly. “That’s all it takes. Why you think it’s so addictive?”
Why inde
ed. Because if all it takes to get as sick as I’ve ever been in my life is to do a drug three times in one week, then that must be an evil drug. Especially since I spent my whole life saying I would never do that drug because of my dad being a heroin dealer.
And now my boyfriend. Or should I say, my soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend.
I guess knowing something about heroin doesn’t really matter, does it? It is just one sneaky drug. When you’re doing it. When your man is doing it. It just creeps up on a person, and it is staggering when you find out what it is doing to you (or to your man) right under your nose. Suddenly, I have a lot more compassion for heroin addicts. And the people who love them.
I understand how someone can not know.
Of course, maybe I was prequalified for this type of “surprise,” since I grew up in a world where forces that have been percolating for some time can “unexpectedly” culminate in a new foster home, or an arrest, or some other life-altering development. Eastern philosophy has a phrase to express this idea: “The river runs a long way underground before it comes to the surface.” It means even though a thing can stay hidden a long time, it is nevertheless there and will eventually be seen.
Brandon comes back to New York for a few weeks after his South Carolina experiment and we try to reconcile, but it just won’t work. After three years together, our relationship has simply run its course and there is nowhere else for it to go. One day I just say out loud what we both must be thinking: “It’s over.”
But not because I don’t love him. I do. Because it’s just not meant to be.
PAUL AND I HAVE PICKED a date—November 28, 2004. It’s a Sunday, because I was doing some astrological research and I learned that Saturday is named after Saturn, which is the planet of tests and limitation. I figured why not just avoid all that and get married on a Sunday? Paul and I already have three divorces between us, so we need all the help we can get.
We’ve also been seeing my therapist Saundra in advance of the wedding. I suggested it after the whole Caitlin Kelly incident, and Paul agreed with no hesitation. Not that much has really come out of our sessions together (we’ve only had two so far), but my individual sessions have certainly gotten more interesting.
TRACY: I hate the whole thing about Caitlin Kelly.
SAUNDRA: What “whole thing”?
TRACY: How he lied. Do you think he had sex with her?
SAUNDRA: Do you think he had sex with her?
TRACY: Probably. Although he really didn’t seem like he was lying. I hate that he lied.
SAUNDRA: You don’t have to rush into this.
TRACY: We’ve already got the date. [I’m afraid if I don’t do it now, I never will.]
SAUNDRA: Then you just need to know you’re marrying a man who is a liar.
TRACY: Ugh. Does that mean I shouldn’t marry him?
SAUNDRA: He’s not a bad person. He just lies. You need to take responsibility for that.
I love how Saundra breaks it down for me but doesn’t tell me what to do. Or what not to do. She just tells me the truth. Paul is a liar. Not all the time about everything. But when he feels threatened—when he believes he’s going to lose something valuable, like me and Sam—he compulsively hides what he thinks will cause him to be rejected. It’s all about power. Paul wants more than it is humanly possible to have.
He wants to control me by limiting my information, which limits my options. If I knew he spent the weekend with Caitlin Kelly I might choose to leave. At the same time that he wants to limit my options, he wants to keep all his open. I get that. Not that it’s right, but at least I understand it.
So, as I sit on the ice-blue sofa later, in the loft that is my home now, just like I thought it would be when I saw that picture online, I decide that I can take responsibility for Paul being a liar. I can marry him, eyes open.
I believe in love.
I see him for who he is way inside, the part of him that has never been touched by his lying dad or his fearful, wounded mother. I see a sweet, open, talented little boy who created layer upon layer of defenses but who wants to be loved and is tentatively taking a step toward letting some of those defenses go. It’s not going to happen overnight.
I believe he wants a healing, or he wouldn’t be with me. He wouldn’t be willing to go to therapy with me. He wouldn’t be marrying me. He wouldn’t be loving me. He wouldn’t be loving my son. I decide to have faith that every single thing that has happened since the elevator doors opened is part of the answer to my prayer and to know that—no matter what happens—I am exactly where I’m supposed to be.
Am I crazy? Probably. But not really.
I can’t quite reconcile how it is that something as fucked up as my relationship with Paul is nevertheless exactly what I need to do. I want things to be tidy and logical, like they are for the Betsys of the world and that nice couple who used to live next door to me in Glendale. But I’m starting to get that I didn’t come here to have Betsy’s life—where the cart and the horse are in the right order, where Dick and Jane and Spot are all doing the right thing—because if I had, I would know it by now.
I came here to live a life just like the one I’m living, where it’s royally complicated and not at all comprehensible unless you look with your heart. My soul needs this experience somehow, needs Paul somehow, and needs to keep moving toward him instead of walking away. I’m just having faith that, eventually, I’ll find out why.
Thirteen
I Love You, but I’m Ready to Start Dating
I’M PREGNANT. And it’s the best thing that has ever happened to me. Not that I was “trying”—in the suburban sense of the word—for a baby. But the moment I saw that plastic pregnancy test stick with the big plus sign on it, I knew that this baby—a boy, due in April—was indeed the Plan for my life. I’ve never been more sure of anything in all my thirty-one years on the planet.
Indirectly, I can thank one of the senior news writers in New York for this blessed event. One day we were sitting around in the newsroom, and I asked her if she had a boyfriend. “Me?” she joked. “Haven’t you heard? We lady writers call ourselves the news nuns.” I didn’t think being a news nun was the least bit funny, and it’s only slightly oversimplifying the story to say that I decamped for Los Angeles a month later to avoid becoming one.
That was almost exactly a year ago.
The baby’s daddy is one of my coworkers in TV news. Dan is thirty-two and normal. He’s got flawless Mediterranean skin and dark eyes that surprise you when they turn out to be blue. And though he’s a little on the short side, he’s got an especially nice way about him and he’s wryly funny, and I like that. We were paired together (I write, he edits) on my very first shift at KNBC-TV and I took notice of him right away because of his superior news judgment. His editing skills are network-level, which is not something you see a lot in Los Angeles. News out here, especially local news, tends to be kinda junior varsity.
I was making an exception dating Dan. I have always refused to go out with guys in TV news. They’re too regular. But after three years in New York, I was very lonely and still smarting from all that “excitement.” I wanted to be with someone nice for a change—you know, return to my UNG roots. Guys in New York might be dashing, they might be sexy, they might be accomplished…but nice? Not really. Nice modelizers, maybe. News nuns certainly need not apply.
Dan is pretty much my total opposite in every way. I am talkative, he is quiet. I am a big personality, he is low-key. He follows the rules, I break them. I’m an optimist, he’s a skeptic. I think we are dating each other for the same reason—to see how the other half lives. We want to try something completely different.
After a few months the novelty begins to wear off, and we realize getting involved with your complete opposite isn’t the same as it is in the movies. My quirks have become more annoying than heart-warming, and his inability to dance no longer seems so charming. Not that there are fights or fireworks—not at all. But there’s no big, compelling love sto
ry to keep us together, either.
“I don’t know if this is working out,” he says one Sunday.
“I don’t know if this is working out, either,” I say back.
We agree the whole relationship has been a fine experiment but it’s over and we should go back to being nice, friendly coworkers again. We break up.
The next day I’m out Rollerblading on Venice Beach, and I pop into Dan’s house to see what he’s up to. We live just six blocks away from each other, both of us within view of the water. He’s not busy, so naturally we end up having sex on his sofa, for old times’ sake. After all, yesterday was a long time ago. The whole thing happens so spontaneously, I don’t even take off my Rollerblades. It’s all kinds of fun and when it’s over, I leave. No need to prolong the encounter. Dan and I are still opposites, and we’re still broken up.
Little do I know, I am skating away with my baby.
EIGHTEEN WEEKS LATER I’m lying flat on my back. An ultrasound technician has just smeared a pile of goo onto my midsection, and now she’s getting ready to mow a small, handheld paddle across my bulging belly. This is the “big” ultrasound, the one where they’ll be able to tell the sex of the baby Dan and I are having. We still haven’t decided if we want to know.
On the one hand, we are both in the news business, which means we like information. A lot. So much that we made it our job. We get paid to make sure there’s as much information out there as the world can possibly hold. On the other hand, there’s something just a little bit crunchy about us—we’ve both got flower child rising—and that makes us want to go “natural” for everything. Especially everything related to pregnancy and childbirth. And it’s not natural to know the baby’s sex in advance.
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