Ninety Days

by Bill Clegg

  So. The silver. It just sits there. I bump into it a few times while pulling shoes down from the upper shelf of the closet, or knock against it as I’m putting away some blanket or box. This is Mom’s, I remind myself each time, not mine. I have a few thousand dollars in my account—money remaining from a former client who repaid money I’d loaned her last year to cover an unexpected tax bill. Kim contacts the former client when I’m in Lenox Hill and miraculously a big chunk of cash materializes just as a deposit is needed for rehab. It is only in the last week that Kim has transferred the remaining money—just a little over two thousand dollars—into my checking account.

  After the deposit at the rehab (which represents less than a quarter of the total bill, which they’ve agreed to let me pay back over time), the next big expense is the apartment. The deposit on the apartment and the broker’s fee came from money I borrowed from Elliot—a guy I had an affair with a few years before, who became a friend. He lived with his ex-boyfriend a few blocks from One Fifth and they had, a few years back, broken up. The affair is short and boozy and ends weeks after it began on a weekend when Noah is away. Afterward, we become friends and see each other for dinner every few months or so. I don’t see Elliot much in the six months preceding my relapse, but once I make it to White Plains he is one of the few people other than Jean who visit on a regular basis. He comes on the weekends to play tennis on the cracked, weed-choked asphalt slabs that pass for courts. We play for a while and walk the grounds. We don’t talk much, but the distraction of the game and the easy air between us are welcome reprieves from the tormenting thoughts of my recent history and my all-too-near future. Elliot arrives each time with tennis racquets in hand and little gesture toward or judgment of the dark path that led me here. Elliot is exactly my age, exactly my height, similarly featured and colored, but has an enviable midwestern openness and ease that I don’t possess. Elliot runs a highly respected nonprofit organization, we have virtually no one in common, and besides Dave and Jean and Julia and Cy, he is one of my few remaining friends. My once crowded life has dwindled to a few resilient stragglers. Elliot is one.

  So Elliot lends me the money for the first month’s rent, deposit, and broker’s fee. I ask him because before I return to New York, he offers to lend me money if I need it. Some last scrap of vanity has kept me from going into my financial problems with him but he clearly detects trouble. At the time that he offers, asking Elliot for money seems out of the question, but weeks later he’ll be the one person I think I can ask. I can’t ask Dave for one more favor or helping hand, as he’s at the breaking point already, and I can’t risk losing Jean’s friendship—​especially not now when I have so few people left. I have a strong sense that if I asked her, it’d be curtains. Her wealth, I imagine, must be a familiar elephant in the room, a known animal brushing against most interactions. Now that I’m wiped out financially, it suddenly becomes, between us, an entire herd.

  The first day Jean visits me in White Plains we go for a walk. As we walk I complain about how I’m not sure I can return to New York because I have no money, not sure I can stay in the rehab because it’s so expensive, not sure I won’t have to move in with my sister in Maine, and not sure I’ll ever crawl out from under the mountain of debt that has risen since the day I relapsed two months ago. It’s all I talk about because at the moment it’s all I can think about. As we’re walking Jean stiffens and goes quiet. She swats an invisible fly from her face and she doesn’t turn to look at me when I ask her if she’s OK. The elephant has its hoof on her throat and suddenly I recognize that the only way to make it go away is to name it. Loudly. So I blurt out something about how I’m suddenly poor, getting poorer by the second, and that I’m terrified. That I’m going to need to talk about being terrified with my friends, and since she’s one of the few I have left, I need to be able to worry to her without her thinking I’m doing so because I want her to solve the problem. So ditch me because I’m tedious, but not because you’re worried I want you to bail me out. I don’t remember what she says to this but I remember her laughing, and that by the time we returned from our walk, the elephants had lumbered away.

  So I return to New York, see the studio on 15th Street, and even though the rent is pretty cheap, I can’t afford it. The landlord and broker need all that money. Since Jean and Dave are out, and because most of my family is broke, I ask Elliot. The first time in my adult life I’ve asked anyone for money, and Elliot’s yes is as uncomplicated as if I’d asked him for a French fry off his dinner plate. As uncomfortable as the asking is, as grim as the circumstances are that bring me to the question, the yes is a miracle. The yes, with all its confidence and kindness, is like Jane’s kiss on the street near One Fifth, or Jean’s bags of food. It cuts through the plaque of shame and reminds me that somewhere underneath the wretched addict is a person worth being kind to, even worth betting on. And I do not look like a good bet, that much is clear from any perspective, but when I tell Elliot I don’t know when I’ll be able to pay him back, he just says, I’m not worried. I know you will.

  With Elliot’s money, May’s rent is paid. I have no idea where June will come from. I’m eleven days sober, have a couple of grand in the bank, and with less than two weeks before it’s time to pay next month’s rent, I remember the silver. Of course, the silver. I’ll sell the silver, pay the rent for June and July at least, and pay my mother back someday, somehow. At coffee after the Meeting House that night I ask Luke if he knows of a place that buys silver and he tells me about a guy on 25th Street between Sixth Avenue and Broadway. As soon as he says the address my stomach tightens: it’s in one of Jack’s off-limits trigger zones, just a few doors down from the office building where our literary agency had been. I don’t say anything to Luke, but as I head toward home that night I think, I won’t tell Jack and I’ll just get it over with.

  The next day, I grab my little blue and red knapsack and head up Sixth. The store is a combination pawnshop and rug showroom. It’s huge and dark with great piles of carpets rising from the dusty floors and spider plants withering in the window. As I wait for someone to come out from behind the piles of rugs to help me, I imagine how many unseen rooms like this exist in the city, spaces behind doors I’ll walk by a thousand times and never see. Since coming back, I’ve been amazed by how little I’d noticed before. Streets I’d walked on for ten years and never saw what was on them: pink town houses, eighteenth-century synagogues, ceramic shops, spectacular doorknobs, Italian bookshops. As with so much, I had been aware of so little off my narrow path or outside my own limited world. And there are so many worlds—fashion, academia, real estate, dance, education, firefighting, finance, advertising—each feeling, I imagine, like the center of the universe. All these separate and self-contained worlds making up entire cities within the city, coursing alongside and invisible to one another. How is this occurring to me for the first time? I wonder. How small my life and the world it happened within both seem now. What I know: book publishing, restaurants that serve vodka, crack dealers and crack dens. Bookstores, literary agencies, rug-strewn, book-crammed living rooms of editors and authors; gloomy apartments where people smoke themselves into shaky shadows, these I know. And now there are all the meeting rooms where I go each day and the diners and coffee shops we descend on in packs after. But these are just the tip of the iceberg. There are the rooms for sex addicts and crystal meth addicts and debtors, and the rooms for all the people who love them—a whole empire of rooms filling regularly, every hour of every day and with no one paying or getting paid to be there. Invisible cities, invisible rooms we pass by until by way of desperation or desire or ultimatum they are revealed to us. Like this room—a dusty cavern with spider plants, Persian rugs, and now a knapsack filled with silver.

  A middle-aged man with a trim beard, dark skin, and a bright, singsong voice comes out and says hello and can he help me. I unpack the silver and after he’s inspected each ingot and coin he pulls out a calculator and begins to elegantly tap the
keys until, after a minute or two, he turns the face of the gadget to me and on its screen is a figure just north of six thousand dollars. Nearly three months’ rent, I calculate, and right away, without pausing, I say, Deal.

  After he slowly writes out a detailed receipt and cuts me a check, I rush to the nearest Chase branch—the one at Sixth Avenue and 23rd Street—and deposit it into my checking account. I go to the teller instead of an ATM, thinking the money will make its way into my account faster. I hand over the check, grab my second receipt of the day, and head toward the door. I enter the small vestibule that separates the inside of the bank from the street. I’ve been here before, hundreds of times—it’s the branch where Kate and I opened the business and client trust accounts for the agency—but suddenly I remember the last time I visited, over two months before, deep in the bender that landed me in the emergency room at Lenox Hill. I remember that I’d run out of drugs and exceeded my ATM limit for the day, so with passport and cash card in hand, I rushed to this branch. Rough from many sleepless nights and crashing from more than an hour without a hit, I withdrew three thousand dollars, stuffed it in the upper front pocket of my black Arcteryx jacket, and headed for the door. In my hurry I failed to notice that the zipper on the bottom of the pocket was unzipped, and when I stepped out of the bank into the vestibule, the cash dropped from my jacket. With air rushing through the doors on either side of me, the money flew everywhere. Hundred-dollar bills, mostly. I remember how, for a moment, it didn’t look real and I was mesmerized. It looked like one of those game show challenges where people are put in a chamber of wind-tossed cash and they have thirty seconds to grab as much as they can. But when I saw a hundred-dollar bill fly out the door into the street I snapped to life.

  Standing here, two months later, I picture my thin, wrecked, desperate self, scrambling to collect a windstorm of bills. I remember sweat pouring down my face, and the blasts of cold air coming in from the street. I remember a guy with a bike helmet on and two young women helping me collect the money. I remember putting the wad of bills back into the same pocket and its falling out again, but this time the guy with the bike helmet pounces and prevents the bills from flying. You OK? he asks doubtfully, and as I double-check the zippers I see my hands—stained black from scraping charred wire screens, blistered with lighter burns, and scabbed all over from nicks and cuts from dozens of shattered glass stems. I shove the money in my jacket pocket again, hide my hands in my jeans, and, not knowing how to respond, hurry to the street.

  I try to remember where in the vestibule I was that day and how long it took to collect the bills. People—now in late spring clothes, not bundled for winter as they were then—pass in and out of the bank in front of me, and I try to picture one of them dropping three thousand dollars’ worth of cash. Twice. I try to imagine what I would do and how I’d react. How on earth did I not get arrested? It seems so cartoonish and unlikely, so far away.

  Further away is the memory of me and Kate meeting in this same space before sitting down with a bank officer to open the accounts we needed to start the agency. How many years ago was this? Four? Five? Three? I can’t remember, and I can’t see us then. It’s too painful or too long ago, but in either case I can catch only the edges of that day, the conspiratorial air, the excitement and trust that passed between us. The hope.

  I leave the little time machine bank vestibule and step out into the warm afternoon. It’s almost three and I have three hours to kill before the six o’clock meeting at the Meeting House. I’m hungry and exhausted and think, fuck it, the Meeting House can survive with one less junkie tonight. I think this even though I’d agreed to meet Polly there. I’m not a babysitter, I say out loud, feeling the giddy rush of deciding to skip the meeting pushing away the heavy memories of just a few moments ago. I’m no one’s keeper! I go on, declaring to the air like a lunatic.

  As I walk home, I wonder how long it will take the check to clear, how long before the six thousand dollars will add to the two thousand in the account already and make eight. Eight thousand seems like an enormous amount of money. More than three months’ rent. The apartment would be covered into the fall, and with bags of food from Jean, I’ll be OK past October. The bank is at 23rd Street and Sixth Avenue. My apartment is at 15th Street and Seventh Avenue. Somewhere south of 20th and north of 16th I remember again that day two months ago, leaving the bank with three thousand dollars stuffed in my jacket, calling Rico from the street and telling him to meet me at my room at the Gansevoort Hotel. I remember him saying he was only a block away and how my heart raced as I hailed a cab to get there before he did, how his van was pulling up to the hotel just as my cab was, and how I hopped from one vehicle right into the other. From call to cab to van and back to my room took less than five minutes, some kind of record, and in the middle of the day, no less. Remembering the return to the hotel room, the wealth of drugs, the remaining cash in hand, and the night ahead starts my heart racing. I think again of the two thousand in my account. The two that will be eight. Following the thousand-dollar-a-day logic of those nights at the Gansevoort, three months’ rent becomes eight nights high. Eights nights less the thousand I owe Rico and the thousand I owe Happy. Six nights high. If I call one of them now and pay back what I owe I’ll still have a grand in cash to buy drugs. And I won’t have to go to Mark’s like last time and suffer through his jittery lectures and treacherous friends.

  I arrive at my building, enter the lobby, and hit the elevator button. Somewhere between the lobby and the seventeenth floor, three months’ rent becomes seven digits. Seven forgotten digits that bubble up from memory like a dark miracle that I dial on my new phone which, until now, has not stored or dialed any dealer’s phone numbers. After a few rings, Happy picks up with a question, Who is this? I tell him.

  ___

  Happy takes his time getting to the apartment. On the phone I let him know right away I have the money I owe him and that I need to buy a thousand dollars’ worth of drugs. I give him the new address and he hangs up the phone. It’s three in the afternoon and he shows up after eleven. I call him a few times through the afternoon and evening, but he doesn’t pick up. I pace the studio and avoid phone calls from Polly and Jack while I wait with the two thousand dollars I ran back to the bank to get. Though eight hours pass from the initial phone call to hearing him knock on the apartment door, there is no turning back from getting high. It’s like a switch has been flipped and I’m on autopilot. No phone call, second thought, or imagined consequence can keep me from doing what I’m about to do. Only Happy not showing up can keep me from using, and if he doesn’t show up by midnight, I’ve already decided that I’ll go to Mark’s.

  At eleven there’s a knock at the door. There he is, looking exactly as he always has: white sweatpants, black hooded sweatshirt, Yankees cap, and large headphones around his neck. Without saying a word, he walks past me into the apartment and looks around. Smaller place, he says, in a voice that is both empty of and bursting with opinion. Wondered where you went, he adds with a hard emphasis on went, as I hand him the cash he doesn’t count. He pulls out ten bags and two stems from the front pocket of his sweatpants and as he hands them to me says, It’s good, and starts for the door. Usually two hundred bucks gets you two bags plus a third bag free, so I say, cautiously, Aren’t there five missing? Interest, he answers, simply and without turning around, before he palms the door and steps into the hall. I watch him go and wait to hear the elevator open and shut before I go to the door and double-lock it.

  From the first hit, which I load with as much as I once would have used in a whole night, there is something wrong. Something off. The drug tastes like medicine, and while, yes, there is a wallop of something blasting through my lungs and heart and brain, it’s not the high I’ve waited for since three o’clock. After exhaling a huge plume of smoke, I light up and inhale another deep lungful. And then another. I pull so hard and inhale so deeply that on the fifth hit the stem pops apart from the excessive heat. I’m high b
ut exactly where I started, still here and not there. And there is the only place I want to be, a place where no amount of this smoke can take me. Is it the drug or is it me? I can’t tell what’s wrong but something is. I call Happy and tell him that there’s something not right with what he sold me and ask him if he’ll switch the bags. I lie and tell him I’m about to start a period when I’ll be ordering a lot more and this is not a great place to start. By one in the morning Happy shows up again. He’s smiling, as if I’ve passed some test, and not angry as I thought he’d be. I’ve smoked down one bag and give him the remaining nine. He hands me back ten new ones that I can tell are colored and textured differently. He doesn’t say one word from the moment he enters the apartment to the moment he leaves. I say Thank you as he goes and then lock the door, take a clean stem, and pack it to the brim. I can instantly tell the difference when I inhale the new smoke and the freight train I’ve been waiting for all day finally hits me. At last, the world cracks open and I fall through, leaving behind for a blessed second everything and everyone. I settle into the couch and, with eyes closed, hold on to what I know will be over soon. It will wriggle away as suddenly as it arrives, just as it always does, and I will, I know, sit on this couch for hours, burning my fingers and filling my lungs to court its return. But it never does. What comes instead is restlessness followed by an urgent need to get out of the apartment. What comes after that are two Asian guys—young, hip, bored, cute—standing in front of a white tile apartment building down the block from mine, who seem to be waiting for me. I ask them to come over and they do. I ask them if they get high and they say yes. I show them a stem and they ask what it is. I suggest they try, and they do. They both get naked and I join them and the hours pass as the three of us thrash around on the bed and stop and start dozens of times to get high and down vodka. At around ten in the morning I am convinced they are undercover cops or DEA agents who have tricked me into letting them into my apartment, and I demand that they leave. They are confused, ask for a stem and a bag of drugs, which I refuse, and at last they go. I sneak to the liquor store on Seventh Avenue and buy two half gallons of vodka and a bag of ice. I drink the first bottle quickly and close my eyes and fall asleep for a couple of hours. I have five bags left and I stuff a quarter of the contents of one into a pipe and begin to hope, like so many times before, that my heart explodes, that my brain erupts, and that the death dance can resolve, for once and finally, in death. I look across my small studio to the door that leads to the terrace and remember the first thought I had when I saw it, weeks ago, when the real estate agent showed me the apartment: if all else fails, there’s that.