Be Safe

by Doug Weaver

  Although Shoshanna has been sentenced to at least a year behind the Cri- Life walls, her attitude here is pretty much formed and bolstered on a daily basis by the fear of not appearing to the House staff as being sufficiently enthusiastic about her recovery, which translates into basically one thing: eagerly participating in every activity no matter how lame you really think the activity is, the first of which offered on any particular day is step study.

  CDW Janice E.’s favored means of facilitation is herself. She’s is a force of nature, and her step studies will melt even the most cynical hearts and souls and will move even the most ossified prison- baked hardened motherfuckers to abandon any previous overt coolness in favor of the promise of a new drug- free life shaped by the satisfaction of paying bills on time, keeping appointments and feeding the dog, much of which Janice accomplishes by contrasting her previous drugged life, which consisted a lot of the time of sucking cheesy cocks behind dumpsters that rest in scary alcoves around MacArthur Park for a morsel of crack or a taste of heroin, to her respectable, well- scrubbed middle- class existence post sobriety. This level of public confession with its plentitude of sordid details is common in NA and is designed to let most neophytes know that they’re welcome no matter how far down the pit they’ve fallen. She describes the addict brain and its attendant poor decision- making properties as Radio K- Fuck: You all know – you know about Radio K- Fuck. Should I knock that lame white motherfucker over the head and take his wallet and his car, or should I just move along?

  This rhetorical strategy – the you all know I been places, seen things and done shit, so jump on the wagon with me because you got nothing to lose – elicits a satisfying roar of approving guffaws from the crowd and paves the way for Janice to pull out her big guns: The Hokey Pokey. No shit. The get- into- a- big- circle- and- put- your- right- foot- in; put- your- right- foot- out…turn- yourself- around- and- do- the- Hokey- Pokey Hokey Pokey. The amazing thing is that it works. This whole room full of cooler- than- shit dope fiends and tattooed convicts get into it. They shake their outstretched feet and their bony asses and Hokey- Pokey their way to the happy realization that they too, at any given moment in the continuum of regular, meaning unimpaired time, can choose to stop being cool and just be lame as shit, like Janice knows that deep down inside dope fiends want the same stuff as everybody else so it’s okay to admit that you have fantasies that involve a front yard with a picket fence and a dog and whatever. What’s especially cool about Janice’s use of the Hokey- Pokey is that it seems to be an overt middle- finger salute to the usual recovery house strategy that involves nailing down the “underlying causes” of addiction. It’s like Janice can see that “underlying causes” amounts to an avoided- at- all- costs puddle of excrement that needs to be detoured around. She equates addicts opining about underlying causes as a recovery strategy out of addiction to people who spend all day every day hanging out at AA/NA clubhouses and dispensing advice about how to get a job rather than just going out and actually looking for one. She compares any New Age strategy for dealing with unwanted behavior, which usually consists of a five- minute recitation of various life- affirming aphorisms (usually into a mirror in the morning before breakfast), with diseased people who are stricken with infection after infection, and who, in an effort to address their conditions, have forgotten that they’ve set up house in a lake of raw sewage. Even the hardened nihilism of many of the gay AIDS- stricken residents melts away. But honestly it’s probably not because they’re jumping on the Life! bandwagon because Janice E’s Hokey- Pokey has enabled them to envision a future that’s shaped by being funneled into the ranks of tax- paying, cruise- taking, mortgage paying, flag saluting members of society, nor is it the result of not wanting to be perceived as a stick in the mud by any of the impossibly handsome prison transplants who are making an honest effort, it’s probably because they simply like to dance. Regardless of motivations, it’s a miraculous experience that truly lifts spirits into states greater than themselves. The downside of this experience is that there’s only one Janice E. in the whole facility, and the running of step study is spread out among all the other CDWs, most of whom are morons like Rick with the teeth and the useless law degree and the royalty- rubbing social climbing parents. The step studies realized by most of these minor CDWs run the gamut of uncomfortable platitudes whispered by painfully self- conscious guys in their thirties who pace the room while looking at their shoes for the whole hour, to grinning human cornucopias brimming with sunshine (turn that frown upside down) and happiness, to bitter Gestapo barking false teeth clattering, respect demanding authoritarians who run the step study like classrooms where laughter is forbidden because being clean and off drugs is serious motherfucking business and you could die if you go back out there and start using again.

  Janice’s Hokey- Pokey has worked its magic. Gangsters begin allowing their dork flags to fly – even Rogarth’s carefully woven shroud of self- conscious faux complexity has begun to unravel and he’s actually surprised himself by shouting: “…that’s what it’s all about!” after about ten minutes of group dancing and shaking his ass. He doesn’t want it to end but end it must. With a look from Janice everybody quickly and quietly sits.

  Shoshanna pounces on her opportunity and volunteers to read before anybody else, even Rogarth, who’s sitting directly across from her, and who has, like a prepubescent periscope timidly peeking through an expanse of unfriendly ocean teeming with enemy battleships, inched his right hand up to volunteer to read as well, a gesture not unnoticed by Janice, who’s got an abiding sense of fairness and is a champion of the underdog, especially gay underdogs, because Janice E. is a lesbian who now and then prefers her people and will often bestow favor on the homosexual rather than any number of heterosexual volunteers. With Janice E.’s blessing Rogarth usurps Shoshanna’s place in the reading order and reads the step, after which, just like he’s a total expert at this recovery thing, he releases a gusher of gratitude, thanking Cri- Life and Janice E., his buddy Gallagher, and the entire staff of Cri- Life for finally giving him this opportunity to finally grow up and be a man; that he’s aware that it was anybody’s guess how long it would have taken for him to shoot enough crap into his veins to kill him; that he’s pretty sure he knows his drug use is due to unacknowledged terror at having been infected with HIV for decades, and he describes in detail a litany of awful things he’s done to other people over the years, some of which aren’t even true, but he’s on a roll and why the hell not. And it’s not as if the details tumbling off Rogarth’s tongue at the moment have remained unedited.

  There are certain facets of his life that he instinctively knows will prove unhelpful in any sense if uttered out loud in public or even private forums. A memory of his PCP- using years bubbles to the surface where he and his partner in crime – an elegant queen named John Royce – had both contracted hepatitis (the kind from dirty needles). And during the course of this sickness they’d each also picked up a virulent case of crabs. And during one quiet night of drug- induced unconsciousness and obstinate scratching, almost serendipitously, they both decided to infect hepatitis- free people they didn’t like by picking the crabs off their pubic areas and dropping them into a tiny glass jar where they would be stored until such time as they might be collected and tossed onto the objects of their enmity. Of course this never came to pass for any number of reasons, the main one being the half- life of a drug addict’s ability to remember stuff – that and the fact that keeping crabs alive inside a glass jar was about as workable as trying to transport fireflies from the Midwest to California inside glass jars. They always died at just about the Oklahoma border. And as Rogarth’s in the middle of this confession (sans crabs and liver disease, of course) his voice cracks and he sobs a little bit and the whole room erupts into this supernova of appreciation for his honesty, something that Rogarth quickly and pretty much automatically perceives as the tiniest chink in the impregnability of t
he wall of twelve- step modeled recovery because he senses that the crowd’s characterization of his confession as “honest” is completely based on context rather than even one morsel of essential content. Because he’s admitted and given voice to details appearing to the closed set of Stephen Spielberg characters – or recovery house residents – or what’s generously described too often as “the American public” to be somewhat raw and therefore private, they’ve been bestowed with the quality of “honest,” a weakness of perception that Rogarth banishes to an “unimportant” part of his consciousness because he can see little use for it at the moment, as any personal benefit to be gained by using this insight as leverage resides beyond his perceived horizons, except maybe, in some remotely future desperate financial predicament where he might finagle his way up through the ranks of twelve- step service to finally earn the title of treasurer for this or that meeting which would burden him with the substantial responsibility of being the trusted collector of the approximately twenty- seven dollars in weekly donations added to the robust sum of $127 as a prudent reserve, a title suggesting that even after the imminent and dreaded yet amazingly completely unplanned for 7.0 earthquake predicted to destroy Los Angeles, The Architects of Adversity 12:30 p.m. Tuesday meeting that’s held in the Senior Recreation Room at San Vicente Park would still be able to provide cookies and coffee to its sober members for five or six weeks without losing a beat even while the rest of the city smolders in ruin. He restrains himself from voicing his concerns: Rather than thanking me for my honesty you should be thanking me for “sounding” honest, because you don’t have any idea at all whether what I’ve said really happened or is complete bullshit. Regardless, Rogarth’s performance has set the tone for the remainder of Step Study and everyone who shares for the rest of the hour reveals facet after facet of shame and regret for acts they’ve committed against mankind and society.

  Janice E.’s been listening quietly, focusing almost all her attention on Rogarth, who she’s aware has only been a resident here for a little over a week. The parable that best describes her Rogarthian thoughts at the moment is The Tortoise and the Hare, the tortoise being the creature who’s most likely to internalize the life lessons afforded by Cri- Life. Janice E. makes a mental note to keep an eye on Rogarth, the Hare.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I want to eat the fucking burritos but something’s restraining me. I look at them both all nestled inside their wax paper and foil nest. Steam rises from the beans and rice and the red sauce. I don’t look up but I know Korn’s studying me, which almost makes my appetite for food dry right up. “Cheer up,” he says as he takes a sip of his Coke – “Becky Stein’s gonna drop by the house in a couple of hours.” And this announcement makes me feel like I’ve just swallowed a couple of bowling balls. I’ve heard about Becky Stein for years but only met him once. He sells meth – large quantities of meth. But more than that, people say he’s killed people before – with a gun. He’s kind of like the gay Kaiser Soze, meaning that almost 100 percent of what’s known about him is from stories people tell – whispered stories of ruthlessness and danger and serious dope deals.

  The one time I met Becky Stein was a couple of months after I’d moved into my tiny bungalow in Highland Park. By some weird inversion of fate I seemed to be one of the few guys in Los Angeles during this one weekend that had any meth at all, which is doubly weird because I’d just started selling the shit. I spent an inordinate amount of time memorizing (sans flash cards) the various denominations and their attendant nomenclatures and weights: eight-ball = one eighth of an ounce; teenager = one sixteenth of an ounce (this designation is a pretty accurate measure of the limits of the meth freak’s imagination, which is disappointing and reassuring all at the same time); gram = one gram (duh); quarter = a quarter gram (don’t sell these – they’re more trouble than they’re worth, having the ability to lure the most people with the least money to your front door and will pretty much guarantee that pathetic petty criminals will be pounding at your door into the wee hours of the morning begging to be given one last dispensation), and which electronic scales were preferred and why.

  I must say that it was a giddy feeling – when you’re the only guy with any product – you all of a sudden become a total hot property and really really popular. Against what was usually understood to be prudent dope dealing practice I’d allowed anyone who wanted to, to come over and buy their meth – a strategy that often gets people busted if it continues on a regular basis.

  I was blazing away higher than a motherfucker all weekend, slamming speed, smoking weed and fucking boys like I was a celebrity rock star. I’d received a call from a guy I kind of knew who said he wanted to bring Becky Stein over to get a couple of ounces of product. Allowing someone to introduce a stranger to buy drugs is just plain stupid and isn’t done except under extraordinary circumstances, which usually means that the stranger has been described as an undiscovered porn star whose got an enormous cock that stays hard for hours – or that he’s a celebrity of sorts, which Becky Stein certainly was. Everybody’s heard about him. One thing I enjoy while I’m high on meth is to play the piano – I can play for ten hours straight – Mozart and Bach and Beethoven and a little Brahms when I feel capable. So I’m all alone in my little house at the moment and I’m waiting for this friend of mine to show up with Stein – and I confess that something I do is to try to impress people I don’t know very well by letting them overhear me playing as they approach my front door. I wanted to make a real impression on Stein so I thought I’d mount an esoteric musical assault on him by playing Bartok as kind of an experiment, rather than the expected Beethoven or Brahms warhorses, just to see how this storied criminal would react to what’s often perceived by naïve listeners as unwholesome music with all its incorrect-sounding modal melodies that can evoke to the uninitiated ear a pleasant unhurried stroll down paths inside a meat-packing plant while ankle-deep in rotting entrails; and clustered harmonies that look on the page like disparate groups of flies massing here and there on a piece of rotting fruit; and percussive, deceptively-simple-sounding rhythms – a process that’s kind of like showing David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet with its un-self-conscious yet brutal portrayal of Pussy Heaven with its kidnapped children jealously guarded by prim-looking widows tethered to their chairs by the awful weight of deadly secrets; and abandoned homosexual gangsters who lip-sync sad ballads to psychopathic sadists in order to earn a morsel of cock, for film aficionados who’ve only been exposed to movies like The Little Mermaid or anything with John Cussack. The piece I chose to let Becky Stein “overhear” was from Book Five of Bartok’s Microcosmos titled “Boating” or “Kahnfahrte,” the title of which has since been changed for some reason probably having to do with accuracy of translation to “Kahnpartie.” I prefer “Kahnfahrte.” Regardless, “Boating” is a lovely and tiny (two pages) piece of piano music designed for the pianist to gain facility in independent movement between the left and right hands. Grout’s History of Western Music describes much of Bartok’s music, at least in terms of its tonality, as being “on” a certain key rather than “in” a key. “Boating” seems to “on” the key of G major, as it ends with a wisp of a cadence like a G major feather that only reveals its tonality by lightly brushing the surface of a world where there’s a shoreline that’s only slightly G-ish. Bartok used the time signature of 3/4 in “Boating,” meaning three quarter notes per measure. Simple. So I play. There’s a motif that begins in the left hand that’s evocative of movement through water – a small boat cutting across the glasslike surface of a misty pond at dawn – experienced by only the person inside the boat. I see above the staff a penciled-in single script letter “B” followed by lower case “e” and I have a vague recollection that once years ago I had started to write the word “Beautiful” there but thought better of it and stopped myself. Decades earlier, in an uncommon moment of un-self-consciousness, I’d actually written the word “beautiful”
above a phrase of a Beethoven sonata I was playing. It was one of those unhurried, unadorned four-part chorale settings in C major that Beethoven was known to slip in between far-flung virtuoso sections in f minor or A flat or something – a peasant’s prayer, a rare place of thankful respite – after a blinding tonal sojourn through the unknowable outer spheres of the universe where fear of the unknown is only mitigated by the steadiness of counting: four quarter notes per measure, 1 2 3 4, 1 2 3 4 – the reassuring tyranny of meter guiding the pianist, as he is able to literally see, through the veil of shifting tonalities into which admittance was granted, one after another, through the hidden portals of newly discovered pivot tones forming the corners of augmented sixth chords, Beethoven snatching the laurel crown from Napoleon’s head, even his tacit approval for the newly minted French despot withering in the blink of an eye. What spirit! And I would have done the same thing – it couldn’t have been any other way: great music would always outshine the pettiness of conquest. And it never should have ended. The simple act of writing above this stark white chorale the word “beautiful” with all its bald-faced subjectivity had carried with it an intensely personal meaning for me, like it was my version of a prayer, the embodiment of my respect for Beethoven, as I sat in the presence of greatness. I can see the folly of writing “beautiful” on anything now. It’s a meaningless word.

  So I’m playing “Boating” with its 3/4 meter and tonal center of G. I’m cutting through the water – it’s nice – and I hear a stirring at my front door but no knock. Good. They’re listening. Emboldened, I crescendo when the theme switches hands. Good. Back to the lonely boat at dawn. It’s kind of poetic. There’s a knock. I stop playing and answer the door. There’s my friend – I think his name was William but it could have been Mike – and I quickly usher William or Mike and two other guys through the door, knowing that this gesture of speedy admittance will be appreciated by folks of the dope buying variety, as malingering on doorsteps as a prelude to purchasing drugs is totally frowned upon. They enter. William or Mike says this is Becky Stein and Kenyon something or other. Stein and this other guy only vaguely nod to me, giving almost all their attention to my piano which I must say is an impressive-looking black instrument: just shy of concert grand that takes up almost the whole room. Stein and his friend look more like college professors than gangsters.