Long Past Stopping

by Oran Canfield

  IT WAS A LONG DRIVE to Tucson. For some reason, Steve owned a house there, and I had a restless night trying to sleep on his linoleum floor. I couldn’t stop thinking about how insane we were going to come across to the other kids.

  Steve had “prepared” us for the convention by teaching the ten of us a few communist slogans in Spanish and English, which we were to yell out at the convention whenever he gave us the signal. Nicaragua was bound to come up whether the United States tried to silence the issue or not, and yelling communist slogans and blowing whistles whenever the United States held the floor seemed like a recipe for trouble. I had a tendency to obsess on worst-case scenarios, but that morning, I found out I hadn’t even come close to considering all the possibilities. Steve had gone out to run an errand and returned with a huge box of U.S. Army fatigues and green and black face paint. He hadn’t mentioned anything about this when discussing what we were going to do to rile things up at the convention. Even though we were running late, he insisted we get into the fatigues before we left the house. When he started handing them out, I was shocked to find that a few of the outfits had Steve’s last name embroidered on them. I exchanged uncomfortable looks with some of the other kids, but none of us had the nerve to ask about it. I didn’t understand how Steve, an open communist, could be enlisted in the army, which at the time was conducting covert operations against the same people we were going to represent at the model U.N. It explained his mysterious disappearances from school on little or no notice, and why he owned a house in Tucson, which happened to be a few blocks away from the military base. I covered up his name and the U.S. Army patch with duct tape and did my best not to think about it.

  In a way, I was relieved to be wearing a disguise, but the problem was that all the clothes were size Large, and we had to get creative with a spool of twine and a few safety pins he had lying around the house just to be able to walk around without tripping over ourselves. All that effort went to naught when he opened another box full of size-eleven combat boots. The absurdity of it was beyond comprehension. We looked as if we were in a Little Rascals film, where they had stolen some military uniforms in a cute but misguided attempt to enlist in the army—hardly the menacing communist rebels we were supposed to be. The face paint we dealt with on our way there.

  Indeed, our late entrance to the convention center inspired far more laughter than fear. If anyone was afraid, it was us. When the speaker introduced us as the “Colorful Delegation of Nicaragua,” we held up a queen-size bedsheet on which we had painted the words PATRIA LIBRE O MORIR, and just in case no one knew what that meant, we yelled “A free homeland or death!” as loud as we could to the thousand or so kids who had shown up to this thing.

  Our first chance to blow whistles and yell slogans came when the U.S. representative was defending the SDI program to the Security Council. Following a commotion on the stage, the speaker announced, “The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics respectfully asks that the Nicaraguan delegation restrain themselves and allow the Americans to continue.” We looked to Steve for guidance on how to deal with this unanticipated turn of events from an important ally.

  “We’ll keep quiet for now, but it’s going to cost the Soviets,” he told us.

  At the next break, Steve conferred with the teacher from the Soviet school and came back to tell us he had secured three minutes of the Soviets’ time allotment to make our case before the Security Council and that we could count on China for support as well.

  “If that doesn’t get us anywhere, we go back to the original plan. Tara, I want you to go up there and give them hell,” Steve said.

  Although some of what was being discussed by the Security Council was of interest to me, the jargon was so unbelievably dense that I couldn’t pay attention to any of it. I was dozing off again when Tara was unexpectedly called to go speak on our behalf. As Steve had suggested earlier, the three minutes was just a token gesture by the Soviets to get us to stop yelling. After Tara made her case against the United States for illegal funding and supplying of arms to the Contras, the entire Security Council, including our supposed Soviet and Chinese allies, voted unanimously to move on.

  “Remember the lesson. Playing by the rules doesn’t work. Back to plan A,” Steve said.

  Plan A didn’t work either. After three more outbursts, the United States passed a motion to throw us out if we caused any more disruptions. We didn’t last another twenty minutes. Steve tried to argue, but he was outnumbered by the ten other teachers, who escorted us to the parking lot.

  “Great work, everybody,” Steve told us on our way to the van. “I think we learned a lot today. The system is set up to serve the powerful. That said, we can take a vote on whether to try and force our way back in tomorrow, or just spend the day in Tucson. If they do let us back in, we are going to have to be good little boys and girls, or they will throw us out. So, all in favor of boycotting the Model UN for serving no purpose other than being a mouthpiece for America’s imperialist policies, say aye.”

  “Aye,” we said in unison. We stopped at a McDonald’s drive-through on the way back to his house.

  sixteen

  In which the young man is caught in a torrential downpour of fecal matter and encounters pure evil in the form of a rock

  ON THE TRAIN FROM Redwood City back to San Francisco, I tried hiding in the bathroom again, but that trick only worked once. When the conductor knocked on the door, I reluctantly came out and gave him three dollars. Even though I had no intention of using heroin ever again, forty dollars wasn’t a lot of money and I wasn’t sure when or how I would get more. That rehab was such a bummer that if kicking cold turkey wasn’t enough to scare me into staying clean, the thought of going back there was. My relapse prevention plan was simple: don’t fucking do it. I still had a tremendous amount of back pain, but otherwise I felt fine.

  After ten days in Redwood City, I had never been so happy to see my roommates, and, despite all that had gone on in the last couple of weeks, they seemed happy to see me as well. I hung out with them in the kitchen as long as I could, but I hadn’t really had more than a few nights’ sleep since I had left. Exhausted, but feeling pretty good about myself, I crawled into bed.

  And then the monsoon came. Shortly after falling asleep, I awoke to what sounded like a full-blown tropical downpour in my room. Turning on the light, I found that the sewage main from upstairs had exploded right above our bedrooms. If being showered with sewage wasn’t bad enough, this sewage came from the residency hotel above us, whose tenants included all manner of drug addicts, prostitutes, and other unwholesome types. My roommate Jake packed up what he needed and left then and there. Eli and Beth were in Japan, and Simon, our new roommate who had only been living at our place for a week, went back to his room and pretended nothing happened. That left Betsy and me to gather as many trash cans, buckets, pots, and pans as we could find to try and catch the sewage coming from the ceiling. When we had run out of containers, I went back to my room, grabbed a raincoat, and started hauling trash cans full of water to the back door. Betsy armed herself with an umbrella and joined me, but it was a lost cause. The trash cans were filling up with thirty gallons of sewage every fifteen minutes, and they were only catching a third of what was coming down. Leaks were nothing new to us—at least three times a week we discovered small drips coming from the hotel—but we had never seen anything like this. As usual, I ran upstairs to tell the landlord what was going on. He came down, took one look, and without saying a word, turned around and left. We didn’t hear from him for four days. He probably thought that any sane person would pack up their bags and leave. When he finally realized that we weren’t sane, he posted an eviction notice on our door.

  I had never experienced this kind of exhaustion, and my back was in excruciating pain from emptying the sewage-filled trash cans twenty-four hours a day. Shit storm or not, I needed to get some rest. I hadn’t had more than a few nights of sleep in the last two weeks. Delirious and in pain, but proud o
f myself for having stayed clean this long, I limped outside to get some heroin just one last time.

  WHO KNOWS WHAT would have happened if I had held out a little longer. When I woke up the next morning, what had sounded like the Niagara Falls had miraculously quieted down to the volume of a peaceful babbling brook. By the end of the day, the leaks had all but disappeared. I was totally broke, but the three roommates who were left pooled their rent money to hire a plumber to patch up the pipes. Jake had moved his stuff next door to a friend’s house on day one, and Eli and Beth, fresh back from Japan, had come in on day two with a shopping cart and wheeled all their shit over to a storage space. Simon, the new guy, went about the unenviable task of finding a lawyer to fight the eviction and countersue. I think he knew I was ready to kick his ass out for hiding in his room the whole time that Betsy and I wallowed around in the sewage. Mick, another new guy, was the only one of us with a decent job. He hadn’t done much in the way of helping during the disaster either, but we needed at least one responsible guy around, and I actually liked him. We all agreed it was time to stop paying rent.

  I had been running on fumes for so long now that when everything quieted down, every muscle in my body was screaming in pain. It had been one of those first nights of sleep that actually made everything worse. No matter how good my intentions may have been about staying clean, any junkie knows that when there is dope left, it’s going to get used. I still didn’t think of myself as a junkie, though, so when I smoked the rest of it that morning, I was once again completely dumbfounded as to how I let myself do it again. That set off the same goddamned cycle I had already been through at least five times by now.

  My recording equipment had made it through the flood undamaged, but with six inches of raw sewage covering the basement floor, there was no way I could bring clients down there. I had no choice but to start selling shit, until Simon got me some work running a mixing board for a company that ran events over at the Hilton. It wasn’t a bad gig, since it paid well and they fed you, but after nodding out for the third or fourth time when I was supposed to have been cueing in some music, they never asked me back.

  I CALLED UP the rehab a week later and told them I needed to come back in.

  “You guys were right, I’m definitely an addict,” I told Barry when I got back to Redwood City. “But there has to be another way besides AA.” I had convinced myself that I would try to play along, until I saw those goddamned steps on the wall again.

  “I’m sure there are a million other ways, but it’s the only one we know about that has consistent results. And it’s the only thing that has worked for any of us,” he responded.

  Barry decided to take it easy on me this time and emptied a vial of a synthetic opiate called buprenorphine under my tongue. It was supposed to ease my withdrawal symptoms, but it didn’t seem to help.

  Since I couldn’t play along with the AA stuff, I decided the next best thing was to just try to keep quiet and not argue so much. It was tough. People kept talking about spirituality, God, and higher powers, and they wouldn’t leave me alone about it. As much as I didn’t want to make any waves, I was unable to keep my opinions to myself.

  “Oran, you have been unusually silent today. How do you feel about what we’ve been discussing?” Jan asked during group.

  “Believe me, you don’t want to know what I think about it,” I said, thinking of all the religious and spiritual nutcases I had encountered over the years.

  “Actually, I do very much want to hear what you think,” he said, closing his eyes and going into one of his simulated nod-outs.

  “I think it’s all a load of shit.” I tried to control myself, but the best I could do was pause long enough for Jan to accept my answer and move on to someone else. Instead he asked me to elaborate. “Well, first of all, it just makes no sense to me how the fuck anyone could believe in any of that shit when there is absolutely no fucking evidence of God ever having existed. Second, on a personal level, I have never seen anyone’s belief in God benefit them or anyone else, and third, on a much greater scale, religion has been and continues to be the cause of a huge percentage of all the fighting throughout history and now. I don’t want anything to do with it.” I felt as if what I was saying was so obvious it didn’t even warrant mentioning.

  “Fair enough, but we’re not talking about religion; we’re talking about spirituality and a god of your understanding. Could be anything you want,” Jan said. He still had his eyes closed and was tapping his fingers together almost in a prayer position.

  “Maybe there’s a difference to you, but where I grew up it’s the same exact shit. I knew a guy who lived on our block who used to meditate six hours a day, but he was always yelling at me and my brother just to fucking yell at us. Then, after he died of cancer, we found out he had been beating his kids. Sorry, but spirituality didn’t seem to help that guy or anyone around him too much. Shall I go on? Because I’ve got plenty more stories where that came from,” I said.

  “No. That’s fine. I just really want you to give some thought to this idea that it can be anything. Even the doorknob or the light switch. Some people use the ocean. Whatever. The main thing is it can’t be you, and it should be loving and nonjudgmental,” he said, finally opening his eyes to look at me.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me. That light switch is loving and nonjudgmental?” I asked.

  “If not, then find something that is.”

  I WAS DISAPPOINTED to find that my yoga spot behind the cute girl was taken by a new guy. He was about my age and looked like your everyday suburban, blond football-player type except for the yarmulke pinned to his head. He was so white that I decided he must be an albino, but when he approached me after yoga, I noticed he had blue eyes. The only albino I had ever met before had pink eyes.

  “You kickin’ dope, man?” he asked me outside at the smoking area.

  “Yeah, I’m actually starting to feel better, though,” I said.

  “Me, too,” he said. I gave him a closer look.

  “You look fine to me,” I said.

  “I mean, I’m kicking dope, too. Or I will be in a few hours. I had to finish everything before I let my parents bring me here. But yeah, I feel fucking great right now.”

  “Are you adopted or something?”

  “Oh, you mean this?” he asked, touching his head. “No, I’m not adopted. I converted when I was thirteen. My best friend was Jewish, and I just really got into it. My parents are still Catholic. Are you Jewish?”

  “My mom is, but she converted to anti-Semite when she was thirteen.” It was a stupid joke of mine that no one else ever seemed to get. “I was never raised with any of it,” I explained.

  “That still makes you Jewish. You’re lucky. I had to go to Hebrew school to become one.”

  We both laughed.

  “Where do you live?” he asked me.

  “Sixteenth and Mission. Fucking right in the middle of it,” I answered.

  “Holy shit, so you were doing speedballs? Me, too,” he said, getting really excited. “I used to be able to quit doing heroin whenever I wanted to, but since I started doing those, I haven’t been able to stop. That’s how I ended up here.”

  In the Mission, it was virtually impossible to just buy dope. The heroin always came in a balloon with a separate bag of cocaine since most people mixed them together and did speedballs.

  “Nah. I don’t fuck with that shit. I just did heroin,” I told him.

  “Are you serious? What the hell did you do with all the cokes?” He was clearly agitated.

  “I’ve never understood why anyone would do speedballs. Shooting heroin and coke at the same time doesn’t make any sense,” I said, lighting another cigarette.

  “No. You’re right, it doesn’t make any sense at all, but, man…It’s fucking unbelievable.”

  People on the street were always telling me how great it was, but I had never been convinced. This guy was making a very strong case for trying it, and my anxiety level
was shooting through the roof.

  “But what did you do with the cokes?” he asked again.

  “I traded most of them in for dope, but I probably still have fifty of them sitting in my room.”

  I could see his brain ticking, like maybe he wasn’t done after all and he hadn’t even started kicking yet.

  That night I couldn’t stop thinking about my conversation with the new kid. Barry had given me my last dose of buprenorphine the day before, so theoretically the opiate blockers should have left my system by then. Even though I wasn’t feeling that bad physically, I was extremely agitated. Back at the residence—an unassuming suburban duplex we were bused back and forth from—I couldn’t fucking sit still. I was done kicking, my back felt better, and I’d even been getting a little sleep, yet all I could think about was getting high. When I went inside to take a piss, I noticed that someone had left her purse on the couch. I took sixty bucks out of it and, grabbing my bag, climbed out the window and ran to the train station as fast as I could.

  I had never experienced such an extreme urge to get high before, not without being sick anyway. The train ride back was excruciating, and the anxiety was so overpowering I couldn’t even wait for the bus to show up. I walked about a mile from the train station before a bus came by. Not wanting to run into my roommates and explain to them yet again why I was back after only ten days, I opened the door as quietly as I could and went straight down to the basement. I didn’t have an explanation for them anyway.