by Lucas Mann
On Labor Day, his writing is shaky and smudged. He’s high, but the joy is gone:
[NOTEBOOK, SEPTEMBER 4, 1995, “LABOR AND ABSOLUTION FOR A JUNKIE”]:
Most of my life was bad. Awful. But the third day of a three day weekend was always the worst. The success and the horror are what I need to write about. How to go from horror to neutral and from neutral to good. The red, sweet sap elevated me to good. But I have a great task before me. Life. And I feel overwhelmed. I blame the sap, but that’s not the reason.
It’s illegible after this. There is no reason given, no confession, nothing easy. Just the stories we tell ourselves, and now we’re back to the beginning. Now we try again. In his email to me, my father is already trying again. When Josh died, it was rock bottom, he says. And if he’d lived, he would have shown his goodness more, his softness. There wouldn’t have been anger; there wouldn’t have been shame. I think I believe that, my father says.
—
Time passes.
Time has been passing, and he has been fading, and I have been making phone calls, meeting for coffee, writing, deleting, turning yellowed pages covered in blue ink.
I’ve moved. From Brooklyn out to the Midwest, back East again to an old industrial city where none of my family has ever been. I have a hard-bodied leather suitcase, and that’s where I keep Josh’s writing. I’ve taken the suitcase with me wherever I’ve lived, and many nights, always alone, I’ve opened it and read.
Sofia and I are getting married soon, at a quaint New England inn with white walls. Dave is going to be my best man. I proposed on a hiking trail in the Midwest, kneeling on a damp carpet of fall leaves. Our dog ran around our legs. That’s another thing I did, bought a dog. She is harmless and adorable and falls asleep on my belly sometimes.
In the old industrial city back East, I wake up early and take her to shit on a little dirt patch by the edge of a parking lot on the corner. I’m spacing out, and I look down to see her nosing a hypodermic needle that’s been javelined into the dirt. There are fresh blood flecks around it. I pull the dog off and hear a motor running. A few feet away, someone parked for the night to get high. The window is cracked just enough so they don’t suffocate; the heat is on so they don’t freeze to death.
These are the small moments that still mean too much to me, that I have a hard time walking away from quickly. I stand over the car, staring through the cracked window. It’s a boy, younger than me. His seat is reclined as far back as possible. At first I can’t see him breathing and I don’t know what to do, but then his chest moves, just a little, up and down, and then again. Then he shivers in his sleep. I put my hand on the roof of the car and lean closer. He looks ordinary. Everything about this is ordinary.
It’s the commonness that’s most wrenching.
This is a good parking lot to get high in; they never tow. When this boy wakes, he will drive away and do this again somewhere else because that’s what he does, that’s what a lot of people do. Eventually, I assume, he won’t wake up. I have this urge to tell him, Hey, I knew someone who didn’t wake up. Not as a warning or anything, but because maybe he would be interested.
The dog is cold and has finished shitting, so she barks at me. The boy begins to wake. I leave quickly, tugging the leash down the block to my apartment, where it’s warm and Sofia is sleeping, curled like an infant, breathing long and full. At home, too, are Josh’s journals, hiding under a stack of old comforters in a hallway closet, which is where I always return them after reading, as though my interest is definitively done each time. They’re tucked away with my boxing gloves left over from a brief fitness craze and Sofia’s plastic, portable Christmas tree.
Toward the end, in his second-to-last notebook, Josh began a memoir. He called it a “true novel.” It is ten handwritten pages and ends mid-sentence. There’s a faded pen line running down from the last letter to the end of the page.
[NOTEBOOK, UNDATED, “THE JUNKIE AND THE VISITOR: A TRUE NOVEL,” P. 1]:
Now, I’m not one to say, “Yo, I’m from the streets, G.” Mostly because that isn’t me. I’m a rich man’s son. But the streets are open to anyone. Be warned.
This is written as an annotation, scribbled in a box on the top of the page and linked to the rest of the text by an arrow, amending all the story that is to come. It’s an honest assessment.
The memoir pushes on. It’s just one scene with two characters: our narrator, nameless, and a man named Andy, who, though not telling the story, is the protagonist. Andy brings the drug over. Andy wants to freebase. Andy has had a bad day. The narrator does it to appease Andy, calls himself altruistic. And even when he agrees to get high on a day when he hadn’t been planning to, we never see the narrator taking a hit and we never feel his sensation. We just watch Andy, our Gatsby, experiencing pain and joy, then almost death.
[NOTEBOOK, UNDATED, “THE JUNKIE AND THE VISITOR: A TRUE NOVEL,” PP. 9–10]:
The small, white rock looked like candy and was placed into the tin foil holder that Andy had shaped like a taco. He took an old, empty, hollow blue pen and placed it strategically over the white rock. He lit his flame under it, and all at once a sizzle sound was made and the white stone shrunk. Then the smoke came up. And up. And up. Andy was determined to get every last molecule of that gas. No smoke could escape Andy’s ambition. He kept the flame going. I mean there was enough for three or four good-sized hits. But Andy is a junkie. The only amount that is ever enough is the whole amount and that’s never enough either.
When the last wisp of smoke came up and he sucked it down, he collapsed. Not so much from the effects of the drug, but because he hadn’t let himself have oxygen for a minute or so. So he lay supine on the floor. I thought I could feel the electric currents running through him. I didn’t know what to do. Maybe he just wanted to lie there until he needed his next hit.
“Yo, Andy,” I said.
Andy jumped up like a jackrabbit, like nothing had even happened.
“Family!” he said.
This is where the pen runs down the page and whatever idea was there is lost. I have looked for more of Andy or his like, some other mention of friends who lived with my brother high, in the moments that he kept from the rest of us. There is nothing. Other than this abandoned scene, Josh writes almost exclusively of hard, unfair pasts and certain, triumphant futures. Being high rarely made him want to tell the story of being high. Instead, it made all the other stories better—hardships harder, triumphs more triumphant.
I wonder if Andy was fictive, or not exactly fictive but a part of Josh, the swashbuckling and brave addict he wanted to be. The one who is resurrected before the scene even has a chance to get frightening.
The more I read from him, the more I rehash the stories he told other people, the more my brother becomes fiction altogether. More than a decade after he died, his pages spread out in front of me and he is still hiding. Look at Andy, he says. Andy is a junkie. See him use, but don’t look at me.
—
When I visit New York, Dave and I walk around the block to get high, nothing serious, just stubby joints filled with dry, browned weed. We leave our father, who glowers but doesn’t say anything. We stand in a dark doorway, hidden as best we can be from accusing streetlights, and we act like teenagers. It’s windy. I cup my hands around the joint. Dave holds it in his mouth and lights it. The sputtering flame glows across his face, shadows churning like an ocean up his cheeks to his eyes. His eyes are Josh’s eyes, a flecked, layered brown. Or maybe they’re not.
Dave is okay in that he’s sharp, functioning, and the only drug he uses habitually is weed. He identifies as an addict. He went to a rehab facility outside Scranton for a week, but he was surrounded, he says, by a group of alcoholic firefighters and the place became this macho redemption contest. He says that most people who think, for sure, that they’re quitting, have quit, are insufferable. He went to meetings for a while and my father went with him, but then they stopped. I still worry that he’s going to die.
When I haven’t heard from him in a few weeks, I text him something short and stupid, and once he answers I forget to respond.
Dave is on a Cream kick, which makes him seem more stoned than he is.
“Listen to this,” he says, holding out his iPod.
I don’t want to. I say that. I don’t like Cream.
“I don’t think you get it,” he says.
“I fucking get it,” I say. “I just think it’s kind of indulgent.”
He gives a grimace and then forces one of his earbuds on me. We stand, wire-connected, in a doorway, hiding from light, reeking of bad weed, nodding along to a bluesy jam, and trying to say profound things.
“Listen to Ginger Baker,” Dave says. “Listen to the drums.”
“Uh-huh,” I say.
The drums roll in spasms. Dave rolls his shoulders along with the sound of the drums. I take my earbud out and the music lingers over the sidewalk, faint.
This is an image that recurs in Burroughs’s drug writing, surprisingly gentle. Over the gaping needle holes and the ass fucking, music floats in broken streams, brief, invisible. Over and over, when somebody is trying to speak to the narrator, or when he is trying to remember something, the words and the meaning disperse, like music down a windy street.
What’s that famous story about Burroughs? How he wrote by cutting apart pages and scenes and sentences, refitting newly scissored passages into one another? That’s where the repetition comes in—the images that fit everywhere, that mean the most. Music down a windy street. I think it’s because of the uncertainty. The sound that is so familiar, but you can’t even be sure it’s there. It’s a junkie’s soundtrack, what you want to hear, what you need to believe that you hear.
What can this story be but fragments? Lies? Little packages of what we want to remember, what we want to tell—can you hear it? Faintly? Down this windy street?
“How did Josh play the drums?” I ask Dave. “Who did he play like?”
I remember reading a description of Keith Moon that said he played to the very limits of control, and that’s what I want to hear. Dave hunches his shoulders up by his ears like he’s cold or embarrassed. Then he starts swinging his arms furiously.
“Josh played like this,” he says. “He tried to be so loud that you couldn’t hear anyone else. Like he couldn’t fully feel the music, you know? Listen to the way Ginger feels it.”
He closes his eyes.
“Sometimes I remember the way it sounded when Josh played,” Dave says. “It wasn’t bad, it’s just…when you have to try so hard to make something sound right, it never is.”
He has to go. We hug, the kind where two men beat on each other’s backs with open palms. He’s returning to Beth’s apartment on Roosevelt Island, where Josh’s room is still intact, door closed. Tonight, he will walk down the hall and he will remember rage and drums played too loud, and if he’s feeling generous maybe he will remember the words of a poem.
Beth will watch him from her kitchen, and maybe in his back she will see her other son’s, hear Josh’s voice through the door when Dave sings in the shower.
In Park Slope, on his couch with his cat, maybe Philip Goodman still hears Josh calling his name—Phil, Phil, Phil, Phil. And maybe he finds a way to pity him.
Maybe Lena Milam, tucking her blond girls under a yellow comforter, thinks of unbrushed teeth and tender silence.
Maybe Daniel Chang can still make out Josh’s music, echoing and fuzzed, as he trudges through Bed Bath & Beyond looking for hand towels.
Maybe Caleb hears splashing as he tries to sleep, pictures Josh’s head bobbing just above the surface of black water, refusing to sink.
And people who are strangers to me, those who disappeared. Priya, who loved him and saw him leave her—maybe she remembers how she posed and pouted in all the pictures he saved. And the whores who ran out on his worst impulses—how bad is everything that they remember? And the nameless junkie woman in the Astoria apartment—maybe she survived and still feels his body next to hers. And Andy, if Andy still exists or ever did exist, maybe he remembers tying Josh off, nodding at his side. And those he made music with. And those he fucked. And those at the methadone clinics and the meetings, the ones who might have heard the closest thing to honesty.
And Sima at home in Queens. She still hears the way he breathed when they talked. So slow. Did it stop? No, there it was again. She remembers whispering, Are you there?, into the phone. Are you there? Are you there?
I’m surrounded by other people’s memories, other people’s eyes. Other people’s voices, like a radio that cannot hold a signal, that sounds like every song. His voice is there, too, the softest.
So much is undated, but I think I found Josh’s last writing. It’s in a marbled notebook that he returned to, off and on, for years. He writes, as usual, of childhood struggles and future glory. Then there’s a break. He folds a page into an arrow to separate what comes after. On the next page he writes: Whenever I put an entry into this notebook, it was under the influence of drugs. Like it’s a sign to disregard.
Then there’s another page. He tries to start over, something new, something better. He writes: Humans, as all animals, are ruled by basic instincts: survival, in all its many facets, and power, in the true Nietzschean sense. In every “animal” group, there is a social pecking order. Outside of this, there is the same thing between different species. Look at lions and zebras and imperialism.
He stops there and gives up. Another page is folded into an arrow, and on that arrow he tries to start over one last time. He writes: My Works, #1. Then the next page, the final one:
Ich bin eine junkie. You know what is so damn ironic? In this very notebook where I
—
It’s another day. I am back in New York alone. I’m leaving the birthday party for somebody who is not my friend but who I kind of know. It’s at a karaoke bar somewhere on the far East Side, downtown. It’s late and cold. I walk along Delancey Street, the opposite direction of my parents’ home, toward the East River. There’s a billboard on top of what was once a tenement building, what is now a doorman condo. It’s an ad for itself.
I remember when I started all this, I went down to the Harm Reduction Center near Delancey to interview some of the counselors, and this billboard was a Village Voice ad. It said “Where Have All the Junkies Gone?” in newspaper-headline font. Because a thriving real estate market and a drastic increase in fusion restaurants don’t, or shouldn’t, coexist with the scabby, needle-pocked masses who once huddled over subway grates for a burst of warm air. But, of course, that’s why this neighborhood is so cool, so moneyed. Who doesn’t want proximity to a little danger?
That’s what I always wanted from Josh. Or something like that. There’s a reason why we tell the addict story so many times that it becomes too easy to anticipate the next turn, the pause for a gasp or a slow head shake. He wanted to be something unlike himself. I wanted that, too, still do, but I don’t think I ever had the courage or the desperation, whichever term you like, to give up control. What I remember most, when I remember at all, are the moments when it was just the two of us, and I remember being afraid. I liked that. And he was gentle to me. He was gentle to me, and that felt good, but underneath it was the rush, the fear, the possibility that something big and bad was about to happen.
The East River shudders in the wind. The water wrinkles, then smoothes. There’s a police boat moving toward me, somewhere in the black between Manhattan and Brooklyn. Its spotlight is on, scanning the surface of the water like a long white finger pointing to the sky.
I worked at a baseball camp on the river once. I was leading the kids to their morning game, and cops were leaning over the side of the pier, hoisting a bluish arm out of the water. I remember it seemed so impossible that they found the body or that the body found its way back to shore.
In Paris, once, I walked along the Seine with Sofia and everything was so beautiful that I felt nervous. In the middle of the river, under a sto
ne bridge, a police boat was stopped and two black-clothed cops pulled a dead man from the water. I think I said something pretentious about how there is so much hidden underneath every perfect thing, and then we held each other.
I walk north until Manhattan juts out. I think I can see the bottom of Roosevelt Island. It’s there, hard to distinguish, a few lights in the high-rises still on. I look back at the water.
I remember one more thing, and I haven’t remembered it for a long time. Josh and I at my parents’ place. It was one of the last weekends he tried to change the story and quit, came over for a safe detox. But he wasn’t making promises this time. There was no bluster over the phone. There was only a body, deteriorated, submerged.
Josh lay in the bathtub.
My parents left on a date night. At the door, my mother said, “Honey, are you sure you’re okay?”
I said, “Yeah, fine.”
My father said, “What’s going to happen? He’s in the bath.”
My mother said, “Just watch TV.”
Down the hall from Josh, I watched public-access porn. I tried to imagine classmates’ faces on surgically stretched adult bodies. I tried to imagine the sensation I would feel on my cheeks if they were sandwiched in silicone. I pulled my sweatpants out and inspected, found two new pubic hairs.
There were sounds echoing out from under the bathroom door. I was supposed to ignore them. If the sounds stopped for a while, too long, I was supposed to, well, no, don’t worry about it, that’s not going to happen. The sounds got louder. I muted the TV so I could hear him, listened to his low moans over the visuals of two fake blondes sucking a double-sided dildo like the spaghetti in Lady and the Tramp. Then I turned the TV off. I sat in the dark, listened to my own breath, and listened to him. I thought of movies where pretty, young, white-dude protagonists were tortured but didn’t break. I liked those characters. I pictured him as one.
