When I ran out of money, I got my head together enough to get in my van and head back to Jack’s house. On my way, though, I passed a Guitar Center and realized I could get a few more days out of this run if I sold my drum set. I had needed more drugs countless times before, but selling my drums had never been an option. When the salesman handed me five hundred bucks, I felt like I had just committed a symbolic form of suicide, and in a way it did put an end to a big part of my life.
I was thinking about suicide all the time by this point, but I was afraid of what people would think when they came and found me in my cockroach-infested, converted office space with the drywall ripped out and the windows covered in cardboard. The place was a disaster, and they were sure to wonder about my mostly hairless dead body. They would undoubtedly find my porn collection, and no one, not even my mother, would show up to the funeral. I had once found a Penthouse magazine in Jack’s office, so he might understand, but I wasn’t so concerned about what he thought. He had pretty much only seen me when I was all fucked up anyway.
The obvious solution was to throw out the magazines first, but the process of collecting them from their various hiding places, putting them in a bag, and then finding a public trash can didn’t seem to fit with the hopeless desperation required to take one’s life. I couldn’t figure out a way around it. Selling my drums was as close as I could get.
I ALMOST CALLED JACK when the five hundred dollars from my drum set ran out, but I remembered a friend doing the “empty envelope trick” at the ATM. All I could think about was that I still had a hundred bucks just waiting to be spent. I wrote a check to myself for a hundred dollars in the hopes of confusing them and went to the ATM. Out came five twenty-dollar bills. I spent it all within a few minutes, went home, and called Jack.
“What’s going on? Your mother, Inga, me, your friends…we’re all worried about you,” he said.
I could hear Inga and the kids in the background. “I’m really fucking fucked up. It’s really fucking bad. I fucking missed my birthday and I tried to leave but I sold my fucking…” I hadn’t intended on crying, but it welled up as soon as I opened my mouth.
“Listen.” He cut me off. “I don’t care what you did. Can you get back here on your own?”
I knew I couldn’t. I had already tried that once, and if I said yes, I would have to come up with some magical way to pull more money out of thin air and it would probably involve cops next time.
“I already tried, I’m too fucked up. I can’t fucking believe I did…”
“Listen to me. Tell me where you are, and I’ll come and get you, okay? Are you going to be okay till tomorrow, or should I come now?”
“No. Don’t worry about it. I’ll be okay. You don’t have to do that. I just don’t want you guys to worry about me anymore. Really, I’m not worth it. Can you tell everyone for me?” I was sobbing. Even though I had originally called to ask him for help, something had changed my mind. I knew I couldn’t kill myself, but what the fuck? These people didn’t deserve to have to deal with this shit. I could still sleep in the van or sell it, and then? There was always somewhere to go. The Salvation Army, or maybe one of those refrigerator boxes Starbucks had been passing out with their logo on it. I just wanted everyone to forget about me, and stop worrying. I wasn’t worth it anymore.
“We’re not going to worry because we’re coming to get you, okay? What’s the address?”
I gave him the address and told him I would be fine until tomorrow. Otherwise, I was afraid I might do all my dope right then. I had to finish all of it before he got there or I would never leave.
JACK AND INGA CAME TO L.A. the next morning. I hadn’t showered in two weeks, and my fingers and lips were burned from smoking crack twenty-four hours a day. I had poked another hole in my belt to keep my pants up. Summer was starting, and I was sweating profusely. I had completely lost track of how long this run had lasted, but I was pretty sure it had been the longest yet.
They drove me back to Oxnard and, aside from my sudden outbursts of crying, we spent the entire drive in silence. What could they say? I was slurring so bad they couldn’t understand me anyway. Even though rehab clearly wasn’t working, my only success at staying clean in the last two years had been a result of complete isolation from the real world.
I wasn’t the only one back at the rehab. Seth, the hockey player, had been flown back a couple of days earlier, as well as a few others I recognized. I was defeated and kept to myself since I wasn’t planning on sticking around anyway. The place was bullshit, and I had finally come to the conclusion that I needed real fucking help. Not this sobriety mill shit.
Dawn and Josh heard that I was back, and they both came to the alumni meeting to say hi, offer their support, and fill me in on their lives. Dawn was working at a café in Sherman Oaks and had just had an abortion.
“Wait a second. Doesn’t that imply that you had sex with someone?” I asked, before realizing I should have offered my condolences first and then led into that. I was jealous, but at the same time I was glad she had finally worked through whatever demons she was fighting. I had tried so fucking hard with her, though, and I never tried.
“I’m sorry you had to go through that,” I told her.
“No, it’s great news! I didn’t think I could ever have kids.”
Josh was wearing an Armani suit and driving a brand-new BMW with tinted windows.
“Looks like you got your old job back,” I said. “What happened with that bag of rocks?”
“Those rocks were hurting my back so bad that my boss eventually came down here and spoke to someone.” I wasn’t a big fan of suits, but he looked pretty good in one. “I don’t know what he said to them, but afterward they told me to stop wearing the backpack.”
The three of us sat outside smoking cigarettes until they called me in for my meds. It was nice to see that they were doing well, but I had lost faith in myself.
FOLLOWING ANOTHER excruciatingly long and painful night’s sleep, I checked out of the rehab, and Jack gave me a ride from Oxnard back to L.A. to get what few belongings I still had out of the apartment. I also needed to get my van before it got towed. Even though Jack had seen the worst of me only a week and a half earlier, I was still too embarrassed to let him see the shithole I had been living in. I could tell him how bad it was, but I couldn’t let him see for himself.
I took the cardboard off the windows, threw my dirty clothes into a bunch of trash bags, and cleaned up as best I could. With Jack waiting in the parking lot across the street, I didn’t have time to patch up the walls I had ripped apart, and there was nothing I could do to hide the countless cigarette burns I had left on Nora’s mattress and carpet. The only thing I could hope for was that I never ran into her or any of her friends ever again. It was unlikely, but I could always hope.
Following Jack back to his house, I felt defeated. I had tried everything I could think of in the past two years to get my shit together, and nothing had worked. I hated all that One-Day-at-a-Time and Easy-Does-It shit with a passion. Although it just didn’t make sense that a three-word saying could get me clean, there were a few things that were hard to deny. The one that always struck a chord was when someone would say, “When I was I kid I never dreamed of growing up to be an alcoholic or a junkie. I wanted to be a…” Usually a fireman or jet pilot or some shit, which couldn’t have been further from the many things I had thought of becoming. But it was true that I had never once entertained the fantasy of growing up to be a crackhead junkie. Having gone through all this shit myself, though, I was way past looking down on drug addicts. Not to say that I thought very highly of myself, but staying high all the time was hard, thankless work, and there were no benefits that I could see. Until I got uncomfortable, of course; then I couldn’t see the consequences.
It was all so goddamn tragic and confusing that I decided it was time to go back to square one. Hit the reset button. Go back to where it all started and try to figure out what the hell went wrong. A
t Jack’s house, I did my laundry for the first time in months and got another much-needed night of sleep. The next morning I got in the van and headed back to my first rehab, in Redwood City.
twenty-five
Mostly concerns the uncomfortable topic of sex
WITH THREE HUNDRED dollars and my first car, I hit the road to San Diego to hang out with a few of my friends from school before they went off to college and I returned to Arizona.
When I returned to school, my beard was about four inches long, and my friends at school thought I looked as if I’d aged at least ten years in only three months. A few of the new teachers, who looked to be about twenty-two themselves, asked me what I taught and why I hadn’t been at the faculty orientation.
AS A JOKE, AARON had submitted my name as a candidate for student body president the previous year. I don’t know what the other kids were thinking, but for some reason they went along with it and voted me in. Technically I hadn’t even run for the position, which may have had something to do with me winning, because after listening to the other kids give their speeches, I decided to vote for myself too. My first order of business as the new president was an attempt to repeal a new rule that made study hall a requirement for seniors. For as long as I had been there, seniors were always exempt because our grades wouldn’t affect our college applications at that point. My grades were so bad that, for three years, I had spent two hours a night sitting silently in the dining hall pretending to study, and just when I was supposed to get a break from it, they took away the privilege. After a failed attempt at diplomacy, I called for a schoolwide study hall boycott, but I ended up being the only one to participate in it. After only a week, I had racked up almost enough cuts to get suspended. Since my new responsibilities required that I meet with the headmaster once a week anyway, he just waited for me to come to him.
“What’s it been? Four days now? I obviously have never had any luck trying to tell you what to do, but in two more days, I’m going to have to suspend you,” he told me.
“That’s fine. I don’t want to be here anyway if you’re going to treat us like this,” I told him, trying mostly to convince myself that I was fighting for a noble cause. In truth, I was pissed because I had to go to study hall. There were only thirteen seniors anyway, and out of those, only two other kids had such shitty grades that our studying required adult observation.
“It’s just not worth it, Oran. It’s like biting off your nose to spite your face.”
“I don’t get it. What does that mean?”
“You know, you don’t like your face, so you bite off your nose,” he said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “All I’m saying is, think it through before you do something stupid.”
“Okay, but seriously, what does that have to do with my nose?”
“Is there any other business to discuss?” he asked, changing the subject.
“Yeah.” I looked at my notes from the senate meeting. As I read off the list of how many liters of soda and bags of chips we needed for the Halloween dance, I realized that a big part of me really didn’t give a shit whether they kicked me out. Aside from Aaron and Matt, most of my friends had already graduated, and I felt as though I was just biding my time until I could join them out in the real world.
The boycott was ultimately successful, but I had accumulated so many cuts in the process that I was on very thin ice. If I was late to one class or got caught smoking one cigarette, that would be the end, or so I thought. I did try as hard as I could to start following the rules, but getting through a whole semester without missing a class or being caught smoking one of my twenty cigarettes a day turned out to be impossible. To my surprise, however, my teachers would somehow forget to turn in my cut slips or, when they popped out of the bushes to catch me smoking, would quickly make up some other excuse for why they were sneaking around off campus late at night, once they realized it was me.
“Oh. Hey there. I didn’t recognize you. What are you doing out here?” my teacher Gary asked one night.
“Just taking a walk,” I answered nervously, hiding my cigarette behind my back.
“Me, too. It’s such a beautiful night. Well, I guess I’ll be on my way then,” he said, heading off to give a group of four other kids smoking violations. Gary was a chronic pot smoker, and it was rumored that he got high with a few of the students. Every once in a while, he had to pretend to be an authoritarian and catch someone. It seemed as though that was the case for all of the teachers, who were mostly fresh out of college and stuck in the middle of the desert watching sixty teenagers run wild.
Once I realized I couldn’t really get into trouble, I wasn’t nearly so interested in causing it. Aaron and I were taking acid every weekend to use up the sixteen hits I still had left from when I was a freshman, but the headmaster was far less interested in what I did secretly than in my more public troublemaking efforts, such as walking around with a Hitler mustache and calling for strikes. As a result, I found myself on much friendlier terms with the faculty, often spending my evenings at the houses of various teachers who were so lonely they had taken to inviting Aaron, Matt, and me over for dinner.
Holly, one of the administrators, even started including a couple of six-packs of beer every Wednesday night when we went to her house for dinner. We would get buzzed while she would fill us in on all the week’s faculty drama. Two teachers were sleeping together, and two others had broken up on bad terms. Curiously there hadn’t been any student-teacher relationships so far, at least that we knew about. The year before, I caught one of my teachers, Phillip, red-handed when I went over to his house for a tutoring session. Looking in his desk for a pen, I was shocked to see my pot pipe in the drawer.
“Hey, this is mine,” I told him, holding it up so he could see.
“No, it’s not,” he said, looking as if he had just been electrocuted. I had lent it to a girl a few hours earlier, who, it immediately dawned on me, must have been the robed figure I saw dashing into his bedroom when I had knocked on the door. Phillip rescheduled my lesson, and ten minutes later the girl returned the pipe.
It was virtually impossible to keep anything secret on campus, which was why we were all so surprised when Gary told us, “There’s been at least one student-teacher relationship this year.” We were hanging out at his house, and he was stoned out of his mind.
“Really?”
“Who is it?” we asked.
“I can’t tell you till the end of the year,” he said.
I was never very judgmental of these relationships. If anything, I was jealous, because it seemed that everyone was getting laid but me. It wasn’t that girls weren’t interested in me; it was that I didn’t know what the hell I was supposed to do about it when they were. I wouldn’t understand why a girl was always trying to wrestle with me until a week later when she’d start wrestling with some other guy and all of a sudden they would be an item.
When I was aware that someone was into me, I would get scared and run away. The closest I had come was when a girl asked me if I wanted a massage and I talked shit about her friends the whole time she rubbed my back. Another time I walked into my room early in the morning after sneaking off campus to hang out with Eli, who was back in Arizona visiting his mom, and I found two freshmen girls asleep on my bed. In a panic I closed the door as quietly as I could and ran away, fully aware that I would never be able to forgive myself for that one.
BACK IN BERKELEY for Christmas, Mom and Kyle staged an intervention. I hated the way Mom always brought this kind of thing up when we were in the car, usually driving fifty miles an hour down the freeway. Even then it was tempting to open the door and get out.
“All we’re trying to tell you is it’s fine if you’re gay. We just want to know,” Kyle said.
“Jesus Christ. I swear I’m not gay. Not that it’s any of your fucking business!”
“Hey, Ory. You don’t need to get so defensive. We’re not accusing you of anything. We’re just trying to let
you know we would still love you.”
“For God’s sake. Don’t you think I know that? But if telling you I’m gay will end this fucking conversation, then fine, I’m gay,” I said.
“You’re gay? Really?” Mom asked.
“Man! I was being sarcastic, but if I change my mind, I swear to God I’ll let you know!”
“Okay. Because Kyle and I will still love you. Right, Kyle?”
I couldn’t blame them for asking, but I was annoyed that they thought I would have been ashamed of it. Most of my role models growing up had been gay. The real reason I hated talking about it was because I didn’t know why I was so scared of girls. I also had a very real fear that I would never experience sex in my life. I mean, how much easier could it get than finding two girls in your bed?
WHEN I GOT BACK to school, a few new students had enrolled for the second semester. One of them was a junior named Dana. She had long dark hair and wore mostly black clothes with striped red-and-white socks. She even parted her hair down the middle, giving her a distinct Wednesday Addams look. I couldn’t help stealing glances at her, and even when I noticed her doing the same, I couldn’t bring myself to approach her.
Someone must have told her that if she hoped to have any luck with me, she would have to do all the work and do it quickly, because almost immediately she was sitting next to me during lunch, joining me for cigarettes, and tracking me down after study hall to hang out. The whole situation scared the hell out of me, but I felt like I was running out of time and that it would only get harder once I was out in the real world.
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