Needle Too: Junkies in Paradise

by Craig Goodman

  It wasn’t long before Emily assumed the babysitting role in its entirety, and Savannah loved every minute of it. Emily was much more of a girly-girl than Amy, and though she was only fifteen years older than the baby to whom she was playing make-believe-mommy, that put her right in line with a group of Cape Coral teenagers that were doing it for real. And, with maternal cravings of her own to contend with she played the part so convincingly she often found herself fielding questions about subjects she wasn’t prepared for—like breastfeeding, burping and algebra. Jon, Emily’s brother, and I also became close and shared a relationship that was mostly grounded in the musical aspirations he was consumed by and inexorably committed to. I admired that. I think it takes balls to do it that way—not the way I did it like a coward hiding behind a degree certificate that hung upside-down over the toilet. Unlike yours truly, Jon was truly a committed artist without an exit strategy. He got right down to business by honing his craft in a mostly inconspicuous way—not at all like a wannabe-rocker might with egocentric ads announcing auditions for the greatest band in the world that nobody cared about. Instead, Jon bought vintage recording equipment and wrote and produced songs while perfecting his craft for the sake of his art without seeming interested in the attention and adoration that too many musicians are obsessed with and driven by.

  I believe part of what drove Jon’s music was a consuming but reserved sensitivity, which I think also complemented and enhanced the depth of his relationship with Emily, who was much more bold and boisterous. As a result, there was almost a ying and yang component to their relationship and the closeness of that bond was clear beyond words—except when they were smacking the shit out of each other. In fact, they even looked alike—or at least that’s what Emily thought—and just as I couldn’t relate in a personal way to the deep affection she had for her mother, the remarkable bond she shared with her sibling was a mystery as well.

  Although Jon was actually a better guitar player than I, his singing was suspect mainly because his voice was a little meek. He needed to come out of his shell a bit and learn to belt it out and I tried to help him with that. But I think the most valuable service I provided was some tough love concerning matters of creative license, especially when he began discussing plans of generating a buzz by simply recording his songs with the bare accompaniment of a single acoustic guitar.

  “Why is that a waste of time?” he asked as he seemed somewhat offended by my blatant party-pooping.

  “Well, it isn’t really,” I told him. “But I think at this point you have to stick to the formula a little more.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you can’t come out of the clear blue with a relatively abstract thing like that and expect a lot of people to give you their attention. You have to seize their attention. You have to put something together with broad appeal that cuts as wide a swath as possible.”

  “Chris Cornell just released a collection of acoustic shit,” he said in defense of his plans.

  “You’re not Chris Cornell.”

  Uh-oh. I hurt his feelings.

  “He’s dealing with a different set of circumstances,” I said as I went into damage control. “I mean, at this point in his career, if Chris Cornell puts a little distortion on his farts he changes lives and makes millions. You don’t have that luxury…at least not yet.”

  Just then Emily stepped out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around her body and another around her head.

  “Oh God—you two really do look alike,” I said and that was definitely the wrong time to agree with her.

  Observations aside, I should have also been more tactful with my advice to Jon. Although my comments were made with the best of intentions, I’d forgotten that he was a really sensitive and mild-mannered sort—especially when he wasn’t swatting Emily in the head.

  At the end of February I set out on my bi-weekly coast to coast trek to pick up Savannah, and Emily and Jon decided to join me.

  “You wanna little Xanax for the ride?” he asked me as we began the grueling, six-hour, roundtrip road-odyssey. “It’ll help you relax.”

  “It’ll help me drive off the road.”

  Actually, I had no interest in Xanax because it only made me tired and never filled the void, though it took a long time and a shitload of Xanax to finally realize that. Jon, however, would occasionally use the drug in small doses to reduce a kind of chronic anxiety.

  When we arrived in Jupiter and Amy stepped out of her house she noticed Emily in the passenger seat and trouble was on the horizon. And though at this point Amy must have heard something about Emily from Savannah, when she actually saw how young and beautiful she was I believe it changed the game even further and actually ratcheted-up the tension a bit. Not surprisingly, within a few weeks Amy wanted an increase in child support and until she received it I’d be prevented from seeing my kid.

  32

  By the beginning of March Jon suddenly needed to become my roommate, and even though Amy was now receiving substantially more in child support I decided against asking him for rent. Tom, pleasant as ever, had been hassling him relentlessly about a bunch of stupid bullshit and when I heard about it I told him to come on over. A few hours later he showed up at my apartment and as a token of his appreciation he bought me a lamp—which would only help illuminate the fact that most of my visitors were now between 18 and 22 years of age.

  One concession I did receive with respect to the new support order was a reduction in travel distance when picking up and returning Savannah, as Amy would now have to meet me halfway—though she soon decided the midway meeting point would be 30 miles closer to her own residence. Nonetheless, it was better than nothing as it shortened the roundtrip trek, and when Jon came along for the first of these abridged journeys it literally flew right by, especially because he was so good at humoring Savannah.

  “What’s that?” he asked her as I drove west on Palm Beach Boulevard.

  “It’s a magic stone!” Savannah said with wonder in her eyes as they lit up and she held out a rock she found in the fast food parking lot of the original midway meeting point in Belle Glade. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

  “Yeah, Savannah—it sure is!” Jon said with feigned but convincing excitement as he took the special stone between his fingertips and gazed at it—just before chucking it the fuck out the window.

  At first my protective, parental, instinct kicked in and I wanted to punch Jon in the face, but then I looked into Savannah’s eyes and saw profound sadness quickly transform itself into heat-seeking vengeance as daddy’s little girl made plans for the future. But certainly we’d soon learn that all Jon would have to do to get back in the four-year-old’s good graces was grab his guitar and sing a song—any song—and periodically insert Savannah’s name in the chorus as the toddler turned to mush.

  So, on most days during that month of March I would set out to work for a company that helped pyramid schemes more cost-effectively enable a few at the top to exploit so many below, and then return home to my apartment where on some evenings Emily, Jon, and Savannah were watching television and awaiting my arrival…and that was the closest thing to a family I’ve ever known. Of course, the family vibe was periodically intruded upon by my mother when I occasionally felt some vague obligation to share Savannah with her.

  “You better break her of that,” she barked at me in the checkout line at Target as Savannah—with remarkably poor timing—was in the midst of throwing her one and only temper tantrum over a big, gaudy, expensive, Dr. Seuss wall-clock that I would’ve gotten for her but simply couldn’t afford.

  “What?” I said as I was trying desperately but failing miserably to calm my daughter while also teaching her an important life-lesson, namely—not to embarrass the shit out of me in front of her fucked-up grandmother.

  “That’s no way to behave in a department store.”

  “You’re right. Why don’t you grab a hammer from Hardware and set her straight?”

  In w
hat was clearly one of the most awkward and exasperating moments of my life with my mother at one end, Savannah at the other and neither one of them relenting—I was on the brink of tears.

  “Savannah—Daddy really needs you to be a good little girl right now and I’ll have a surprise for you when we get home, okay?” I pleaded with her but she refused to take the bait or cut me any slack, much like her grandmother who continued dispensing parental advice:

  “If you don’t nip that one in the bud she’s gonna be impossible when she’s older.”

  “Should I just beat the crap out of her? Huh? Like you would’ve?”

  “I would never have done that!”

  “Yeah, you’re right—you would’ve waited until we got home,” I said as my daughter let out a brain-shattering shriek. “Come on, Savannah. Let’s get out of here before this bitch starts making sense.”

  I left my mother standing in Target and called home to make sure everyone was aware of our sooner than expected arrival, and the moment Savannah and I got in the car and away from that stupid clock the tears subsided, the sun came out and all was well in Whoville without having to nip anything in the bud. But just to be on the safe side, the moment we returned to the Cape and stepped into my apartment Jon was at the ready with guitar in hand as he immediately broke into:

  Oh Sa-van-nah,

  Oh don’t you cry for me—

  For I come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee…

  Generally speaking, this was a good time in my life as it wasn’t at all uncommon for me to have Savannah for weeks at a time while there were so many people in my immediate circle that were ready, willing and eager to assume babysitting responsibilities if necessary. Whether it was Jon, Emily, Emily’s hot mom or one of my restaurant friends, each morning as I headed out for work and temporarily left her in the capable hands of someone who really loved her, I thought about the future and began to realize the only way I’d be able to provide my daughter with the things I had as a child—other than the beatings, bumps and bruises—was by owning a business. And fortunately, I was lucky enough to have gleaned a few legitimate Internet business strategies while working for Willie Whitman that I thought might help me pull something out of my ass. As a matter of fact, right after Savannah returned to Jupiter in March, Martin Ehrhard—a website developer and former associate who’d enjoyed some success selling auto parts online—decided to join forces with me and build a career advancement website that, among other things, would provide jobseekers with free resume templates to download and along the way, produce some advertising revenue for its owners.

  Each morning at the crack of dawn and then again after work until around midnight, I sat at the computer for hours creating a variety of resumes to serve the needs of virtually any jobseeker, ranging from recent high school and college graduates to seasoned, corporate executives. It was a grueling and excruciatingly boring task and by April, after about a month of hijacking job histories from client resumes lingering on my laptop since a stint in the career advancement industry, I had over a thousand different resumes available to download and use as a starting point to launch virtually any job-hunting campaign.

  “What are you gonna be doing tonight?” Jon asked me early one Friday morning as I was about to be finished with yet another, brutal, resume-writing session.

  “Resumes,” I said as if by this point I even needed to.

  “Again?”

  “Always.”

  “I think you could use a break, you know—it’s the weekend,” Jon said even though he’d be working through most of it as he tossed me a little Ziploc bag containing four Xanax that were shaped like tiny blue footballs along with eight large and elongated yellow pills. “The Xanax are mine.”

  “What are the yellow things?”

  “Perc-10’s.

  “What are Perc-10’s?”

  “One of the most potent pain killers money can buy,” he said even though he didn’t pay for them. “A few weeks ago this dude at work stole a bunch out of his Granny’s purse and now he suddenly wants to get rid of them. It’s not really my thing—but I think you’ll like it.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, I just have a feeling,” he said. “But it’s a real serious narcotic, so don’t take more than one or you might kill yourself and besides, a few buddies of mine are coming over tonight and they definitely like’em…Oh yeah, can I have a few buddies over tonight?”

  “Yeah…and they can have ALL the pills.”

  Now, historically speaking, when it came to drugs—nothing could spark my interest quite like a potential date with death. But pharmaceuticals were mostly unknown to me at the time and much like Xanax they were of little interest, so although I might hang out with the kiddies for a couple of hours before retiring early for what was sure to be the start of long and grueling weekend spent pilfering career goals—there’d be no Perc-10’s for me. And I probably should have said something about all those pills but ironically—I didn’t even know what a “narcotic” was at the time and besides, I was in a funny position to start dispensing advice and laying down the law:

  Not an addict but far from clean—not a parent but in between.

  Certainly, on some level I was also reluctant to seem like a hypocrite or lose credibility as a peer as I was already self-conscious about the age gap that existed between Emily and me. So, failing to impart any words of wisdom in the morning, that evening after work I made the usual Friday night pit stop for drinks with coworkers before heading to my apartment where the fun was just beginning. And certainly, when I say “drinks” I’m merely referring to the bare minimum that would justify using the word. In Cape Coral, even two beers over four hours could easily result in a DUI unless the stars were seriously aligned in your favor, as baby-faced but blood-thirsty and bored-silly cops were known to pull over drivers and hope for the best. And of course—as far as my shitty luck was concerned—the universe had already assembled itself to put the screws in on two separate occasions, though each time I’d blown well under the legal limit. As a result, although I hired a lawyer who easily beat the charges, it cost me $3,000 to not be drunk twice in an area where drinking and partying was part of the culture and promoted so aggressively you would’ve thought the cops owned the bars, and in some ways they did.

  When I stepped into my apartment Jon was there with his friend, Billy, each drinking a beer and listening to music. I showered, threw a burrito in the microwave and then joined my young friends who were in the living room watching MTV. Of course, by this point in my life I was totally over MTV.

  “Put on VH1,” I told Jon.

  “No way, Grandpa.”

  “They’re playing an old Duran Duran concert!”

  “No way, Grandma.”

  “Hey, why don’t you grab a beer?” Billy said as he made a lame attempt to distract me with alcohol. “There’s a case of them sitting in the fridge.”

  Taking a pass on the beer I took a seat on an old recliner and consumed my burrito while listening to Rage Against the Machine—which used to make me want to break things. Then, after a moment I sat staring at the little plastic bag containing the big yellow pills, and then after another I said what-the-fuck and swallowed two of them.

  I’m not exactly sure what inspired me to grab those pills, though I did have the drinks beforehand. At the time, I honestly wasn’t even thinking about serious drugs or “getting high” beyond the daily toke which at this point was almost purely medicinal, not only for me but the lives it was saving around me. Perhaps my decision was merely a knee-jerk reaction motivated by the lingering remnants of a youthful inclination to experiment, which, though initially fueled by artistic passion had clearly outlived its usefulness. After all, I now led a much more austere and less turbulent life while planning for the future as well as the eventual needs of my daughter, and there was no justification for drugs because creating bullshit resumes from real resumes that were mostly bullshit to begin with really didn
’t require too much creativity.

  At around midnight, right after Emily finished her bar shift, she made a brief appearance at the apartment before giving me a kiss and rushing back to her parent’s house. Not only did she have a curfew to contend with, but Tom was threatening to take her and her mother out on the boat at sunrise. Meanwhile, Jon and Billy were busy playing with a Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation device that belonged to Billy’s brother, David, and intended to help him regain the use of his legs after being paralyzed by the fallout of a relatively recent heroin overdose. Yeah, I know—but you can’t make this shit up. Well, at least I can’t. In any event, while Jon and Billy attached electrodes to various parts of their bodies, I began to feel the Percocet and the ravenous junky inside me suddenly sat up, looked around the room and decided to swallow two more pills.

  Obviously, I was overindulging in the drugs at the expense of whoever else Jon was intending to share them with, but I was suddenly lost in the revelation that Percocet was really just a less consuming version of heroin! Who would’ve known?!? And though I assume most addiction experts would consider this a poor “recovery” strategy and one that could eventually thrust a former junky into a full-flung relapse, for me it actually went a long way in deconstructing the myth, glamour and artistic image I’d associated with opiates ever since high school English class. Suddenly, the stories of Shelley, Coleridge and Thomas de Quincy smoking bowls of opium while conjuring-up canonized verse were stripped of their ethereal undertones because had they waited about a century or so they probably would’ve been popping pills—which is soooo much less…Romantic. There was really no fascination associated with that, and though snorting or shooting a derivative wasn’t exactly loaded with poetic sentiment, the aura surrounding it was a HELL of a lot more mysterious and intriguing than swallowing four yellow pills…make that six yellow pills as the gluttonous junky suddenly swallowed two more without a moment’s consideration for anyone who might be receiving or administering shock treatments from just a few feet away.