by Jerry Stahl
It’s Mr. Undercover. He’s stopped me on many occasions and is responsible for my only arrest, which got me locked up for three days. Mr. Undercover’s one of those hard-boiled film noir detectives. He picks up my purse.
“Is there anything in here I can cut myself on, any needles?”
I must stick to monosyllabic responses. If I swallow the balloon I’ll have to wait for hours to shit it out. And like every junkie I have a serious case of constant constipation, a side effect of opiates. He finishes his search of my purse and hands it back to me.
“Well, Miss Hype, looks like I’m going to have to let you go.”
I thank him, and the balloon falls onto my tongue. He catches a glimpse of the bright yellow color.
“What’s that in your mouth?”
“Chewing gum,” I answer, trying to swallow it. My throat’s so dry it won’t go down.
“Spit it out, NOW!”
He pulls down my bottom lip. The pain’s horrific. I think he’s ripped it off my face. Tears shoot out of my eyes. Stifling a scream, my mouth opens up and out plops the balloon onto the ground.
“You’re under arrest.”
Coming down the street are Jose, Maria, Jesus, and Grandma, dressed in their Sunday best, on their way to church. They avoid looking in my direction. I know they are averting their gaze to spare me the indignity of being handcuffed in public. Still, Jesus turns and waves at me, tugging his father’s hand. Jose pulls him forward.
On the drive to the station, Mr. Undercover gets chatty. I’m not in the mood to talk. I keep wishing he would give me back my dope and drive me to my Laundromat. He won’t shut up. He says drugs are just a platform for politicians to get easy votes. Dare to Keep Kids off Drugs is a scaremongering tactic, a lame slogan on T-shirts. Narcotics should be legal. Only pregnant users should be arrested. Addicts are only killing themselves. The CIA is responsible for flooding the ghettos with cheap cocaine to fund the Contras. This is not what he signed up for. In hindsight this all makes sense—when his division makes international headlines for corruption.
When he’s done with his monologue, I ask why he won’t let me go if this is such a charade.
“I got a job to do, paperwork to fill out,” he replies sarcastically. We finally arrive at the dreaded cop shop. I ask Mr. Undercover if I can have one last smoke. He uncuffs me, takes a cigarette out of the packet in my purse, and lights it.
“Why are you a junkie?” he asks. I envision the scene from The Wild One where Johnny’s asked, “What are you rebelling against?” to which he replies, “What have you got?”
With a sweeping dramatic hand gesture I declare, “Because of all this.”
Without missing a beat he says, “That’s just not good enough.”
My Marlon Brando moment is ruined.
Sitting in the cell like a wounded animal, I recollect an argument I had with my mother in my early teens.
“It’s my life to destroy,” I had hissed at her.
“You can’t handle freedom.”
Cold turkey is taking a hold of me. The Klonopin that Mr. James gave me helps me doze off.
I’m in a holding cell inside the women’s correctional facility at the Twin Towers jail in downtown Los Angeles. We call them Twisted Towers. I want to scream but I’m afraid I’ll vomit. It’s an infraction here in the catacombs that will get you a beatdown. There are thirty of us squashed into a sardine can made for twenty. I lie on the floor wishing that the physical pain would kill me. Wishing these feelings would kill me. I am rotting from the inside out. My guts feel like an abattoir. The symptoms of my soul sickness. The agony that stems from my heroin addiction. It’s all that remains alive within me. It’s all there is. I want to smash my head against the concrete floor. My skin is on fire, my every pore is being torched. My eyes are swimming in battery acid. Please, someone; please, Mr. Policeman with the gun, come in and open fire, please kill me. Put me out of my misery. For I know that even this torture I’m enduring won’t stop me from going back to the poppy at the first opportunity. I’m not a victim, I’m a volunteer. I am a junkie, a bottomless pit of despair and desperation. My dreams, desires, and wishes, my hopes and ambitions all cooked up in the spoon. Lying next to me is another girl in the same shape I’m in. She reaches out to me and we hold hands.
It’s five a.m. and I am on the toilet. I haven’t pulled my regulation blues all the way down to my ankles, instead they rest on my thighs. I want to appear as if I’m just sitting here, because what I’m really doing is taking a shit. Even though the correctional officers are busy, they can see me. I flush immediately, so the smell doesn’t linger. I wipe myself quickly. And flush again. My humiliation is palpable. It fills the tiny cell. I take a seat on the steel desk attached to the wall. A slither of bulletproof glass doubles as a window. I realize all that I have taken for granted as I gaze upon the hills.
The car plummets through trees and bushes, finally landing on a small precipice with a sonic crash. Smoke pours from the hood. I wait for the explosion that will blow me to bits, but after a couple of minutes, it fizzles out. Reality hits me. Not only am I still alive, but a fate far worse than death has befallen me. I am now carless in Los Angeles. Tears of rage lash down my face. How is it possible for one to launch oneself off a decent-size cliff and survive? The doors are jammed shut. I hurl myself out of the open window and lay sobbing on the moist ground. I want to crawl away and hide forever. It is pathetic. There is no way humanly possible of making it back up to the road. I have to call for help. I dial my friend Marie two thousand miles away in Chicago. I explain the quandary I’m in. Her words, so loving and compassionate, make me feel like an even bigger piece of shit. She is thinking logically, and calls 911. The EMTs find me almost an hour later, and strap me into a flexible stretcher, encasing my head in a contraption that prevents me from seeing anything. All I need is a ball gag and I could be the star of my own S&M movie.
The noise of the helicopter is getting closer. As it lifts me into the air, I start to spin round and round like a whirling dervish. I am pulled inside, the blinders removed, and I gaze into the face of a rather handsome medical worker. Another time, another place, I would have asked for his number. I apologize to him for wasting his time when there are others who really are sick and in need of his help. He holds my hand as I sob my way to the hospital.
Once there, I am wheeled into an emergency cubicle. The fury welling up inside me is matched in fervor only by the disappointment at having failed. A social worker informs me that I will be committed to the psychiatric unit; she asks who she can call for me. The idea of seeing those I cherish fills me with dread. She hands me a pen and paper, and reluctantly I write down some numbers. Before long, my friends start to arrive. I don’t want to look at them, but my neck brace makes it impossible to turn away. The combination of painkillers and physical discomfort sends me off on a belligerent diatribe.
“I’m going to keep trying until I get it right!” I yell at them. It’s cruel and spiteful. In their shoes I would’ve suggested a .357 Magnum for my next attempt.
My mother is the last to visit me. She is told it was an accident. I can never tell her the truth. She would be devastated to know that her only child was going to leave her all alone. She is frail and old, quietly crying over me. She was right. I can’t handle freedom.
It is then, when I am faced with the anguish and sorrow I have caused to the ones I love, that I am able to take responsibility for what I have done. Responsibility is love. And I want to fall in love again. During my years in the heroin wilderness I lost my dignity, my integrity, and my self-respect. I thought that freedom meant having no ties to anyone, no possessions and no responsibility. When I was loaded there was a ten-foot wall of cotton candy between me and the world, shielding me from sadness, hopelessness, and pain. I was in my own nebula. And I didn’t realize until it was too late that the sugar walls had closed in and I was trapped, a prisoner of my euphoria. Just another slave to the poppy. There is no freedom
in death. I lie in the hospital bed, bound tightly by the splints and bandages, with an overwhelming rage to live.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This collection is comprised of works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The story “Godhead” by Eric Bogosian was published in an earlier form in The Essential Bogosian (Theatre Communications Group, 1994).
copyright © 2013 Akashic Books
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