American Junkie

by Tom Hansen

  Inside the air was thick with sweat and smoke, and the dance floor was crowded. The pot and the MDA I’d taken had turned up the colors. Revolving lights on the walls made the room look like it was spinning. Strobe lights were going off somewhere. I felt like I was walking around inside some sort of cocoon. My skin felt weird. Warm. Tingly, vibrating almost. Out on the dance floor, one man was standing off by himself. Other dancers were giving him a little space, orbiting around him. Eventually I saw he was naked, swaying to the music, shifting his weight from one foot to the other and stroking his hard-on, a strange grim smile on his face. I got a couple beers from a little bar set up against one of the walls and gave one to Lara. I leaned to her ear and shouted, “I’m going to look around for a bit!”

  On the other side of the dance floor red velvet curtains covered a passageway. I went through and down a dark narrow hallway to another doorway with red velvet curtains. I parted them and walked through. It took a minute for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, but when they did, I saw that I was in a tiny movie theater with a low ceiling. Gay porn was on the screen, grainy and unfocussed blown-up images of fucking. In and out. In and out. It was sort of fascinating in a strange kind of way. I had never screwed a girl in the ass before, the idea just hadn’t occurred to me. Smoke trailed up in the light of the movie screen. I saw what I thought were four or five couples, shadowy shapes moving in the darkness. I couldn’t tell if they were men or women, or how many people made up each of them. I imagined them melding together, becoming a dark mass of sludge, flowing over the seats and down the aisles. A man about forty and a teenaged boy squeezed past me, made their way to the seats and sat down, becoming one of the dark shapes.

  I left the theater and climbed a flight of stairs that led to the balcony. Lara was nowhere to be seen. The man was still out there lazily dancing, still jacking off. Occasionally he let go of his cock and it swung back and forth, following behind his hips as they swayed and bounced to the music. My eyes were drawn to his boner. The drugs had done something to my eyes. Everything seemed to be moving in slow motion. A strobe light came on somewhere. Flash. Boner. Flash. Boner. Flash.

  [1982]

  Sasha stumbled into the kitchen. I caught a brief glimpse of her and then she was gone, swallowed up by the crowd of drunken people. A minute later the crowd parted for a second and she saw me, standing by the keg. She fought her way across the kitchen, bouncing off people, spilling the beer in her plastic cup every step of the way. As she got close she slipped on the wet floor, caught herself, then looked up at me and giggled. She fell against me, rubbing up against me like a cat, and buried her face in my neck. She pulled back slightly and looked up at me.

  “Hi Tommy,” she said, smiling seductively. She looked striking, the dark Spanish eyes sloppily made up with smeared eye shadow and lumpy mascara, the child-like face, the neon pink spiky hairdo. I took her hand and towed her behind me through the kitchen.

  Upstairs I pulled her into the first room I could find and kicked the door shut. It was a small room, a mattress in one corner. Clothes were strewn everywhere and a cheap stereo sat along the wall. Sasha flung off her jean jacket and lay down on the mattress. I knelt at her feet. Neither of us said anything. Smiling devilishly, she lifted one of her trashed vinyl over the calf boots. I pulled down the zipper and slipped it off her foot. I reached for the other boot, but she curled up on her side, pulled off her pant leg and shoved her ripped up jeans down the other leg to the top of her boot. I started taking off my pants. For a fleeting second, I wondered what my girlfriend was doing.

  I remember that night clearly, a couple of years before. Audrey, a girl I’d been seeing, had dragged me down to The Showbox to meet her sister. Audrey had run off to get something to drink. I was standing at the edge of the dance floor. My eyes were drawn to a girl about ten feet away. I could only see the back of her. She had long brown hair and a ballet dancer’s body. She was slowly swaying to the music, wearing a tight long sleeved green and black sequin dress, fishnet stockings and high heels. She turned and looked at me. Audrey returned with a drink and pulled me over to her.

  “Tommy, this is my sister, Gisele.”

  I’d always had very romantic notions about love, believed it was some magical thing that operated completely outside human weirdness, something that was pure, that could not be predicted, forced, or made to happen. All a person could do was hang around until it found you. You could not find it, especially if you went looking. And now, finally, it had found me.

  The next few months were a blur. Suddenly, the hard sharp edges of the world had become round, soft, and smooth. It seemed like there was no thinking to do, no decisions to make, everything just happened, naturally, flowing on some powerful current. Nothing was in my way anymore, as if I was a puddle of mercury, effortlessly adapting and overcoming whatever obstacle was put in front of me. Unlike with other girls, where on some level there was always the end goal of getting into their pants, with Gisele it didn’t matter what we did. This was, I thought, what I’d been waiting for. I’d come to the conclusion that I didn’t have it as a musician. I could play well enough but my songwriting had never really come together, despite all the effort I put into it. Every band I’d been in fell apart, and there was no money. I loved playing music, but I’d always had a very hard time changing masks like most struggling musicians, holding down some kind of crummy job during the day while they played at night. What I really wanted was to commit to something, throw my complete and total being behind one thing, one goal. One identity.

  One story. This was it. I would settle down and just be a regular guy, humble and hardworking like my dad. Gisele wanted the same and we began making plans. This was what people did, right? They found someone they wanted to settle down with, something more than a tumble in some room at a party, something that lasted more than one night, more meaningful and respectful than using some woman’s body to jack off with. Someone to be there with you and for you, help you overcome everything the world threw at you. Love was what supposedly made the world go round, right?

  On some level what I’d really always wanted was to do this. All I’d been waiting for was a good enough reason, for something in life to point me in that direction. I found a job working as a house painter. After six months, I got a better job as a non-union longshoreman in Ballard, unloading boats, across the canal from Fisherman’s Terminal. I enjoyed the physical labor, even though the pay was absurdly low and I knew I would never be able to afford a house. Gisele got a job at a high-end clothes boutique called Nelly Stallion, where she didn’t do much except stand around and look pretty and fend off the advances of the owner. I rented an apartment on Summit Avenue on Capitol Hill, a small studio with a view of downtown and Gisele moved in. We did what other couples do. We made love, went to work, the movies, went out to dinner, took walks along Lake Union, rode around on my motorcycle. Gisele would make me vegetable sandwiches when I got home from work. I’d never been so happy in my entire life, and the possibilities for the future seemed endless. I felt there wasn’t anything I couldn’t do.

  A few months after she moved in, when we’d been together close to a year, something changed. We would both come home from work, fix something to eat, one of us would try to initiate something, the other would say they were tired or something, then we’d watch some TV and go to sleep. It went on for months, like we were suddenly on opposite wavelengths. She didn’t want to break up and neither did I, but our relationship, that had come about as naturally as grass grows, without the slightest bit of direction from either of us had suddenly become unworkable no matter how much effort we put into it. I continued to work at my job, trusting what my parents had always told me, that if you work hard things would work themselves out, hoping that things would go back to how they used to be. We had conversations about what steps to take to make our relationship work, take it to the next level and we took them. Nothing changed. I continued working and not drinking.

  Eventually
, Gisele began going out with her friends after work, doing coke again and spending time with a friend of her old sugar daddy. At some point it became unbearable. This beautiful woman, who I’d dreamed about my entire life, was right there, yet not there, so close and yet so far away. I could touch her but I couldn’t touch her. I was utterly powerless to make anything happen.

  After Sasha and I had finished screwing, I lay there and looked at her. She was one of those girls who looked just as beautiful with or without makeup, from up close or far away, dressed up or down. These encounters had been going on for a while. I’d find her at a party, or on the street, go somewhere with her, wonder briefly what Gisele was doing, wishing she were there instead of Sasha, and then we’d fuck. It was the kind of love, the only kind of love that I was apparently capable of. Relationships had always been that way with me, they had always had a trajectory, like a rock thrown up into the air, rising for a time, reaching an apex, and then falling back to Earth. I seemed to be unable to do like other people, and maintain some sort of static line that wavered occasionally.

  Sasha lay on the messed up mattress, still panting a little, looked up at me and smiled. Her makeup was smeared and her eyes were bright. I didn’t even know how old she was, maybe seventeen, I’d never asked. We dressed and went back downstairs and she ran off to talk with one of her friends. I drank. Eventually, we left and went to her place, a little closet in a friend’s apartment. Before I left the next morning, we sat in the kitchen smoking and drinking coffee. She removed some black leather strings from her battered purse and wove together an elaborate little bracelet. When she was done she tied it around my wrist and kissed me goodbye.

  [LATE 1982]

  I slid my key into the lock and opened the door. The apartment was very empty now. Gisele had moved in with a friend of her last rich boyfriend. I had made some desperate attempts to get her back but she wasn’t having it, and in the end I knew that things were just going back to the way they should be. She had a certain comfort level selling herself to rich guys and I had a certain comfort level with emptiness. I tossed the mail onto the Murphy bed and removed X, my cat, from inside my coat. A month before I’d found him on the street, the only one of the many feral cats in the neighborhood that would let me approach him. He had dirty white fur, one blue eye and one green. He was a poor substitute for Gisele, but at least it was something, a little bit of simple, unconditional love. I understood now what the big deal was with some people and their pets. They supplied a kind of love that humans, apparently, were incapable of. I walked into the kitchen and poured him a bowl of dry Meow Mix, the only food he would eat. He heard the food tinkling into the bowl and came trotting into the kitchen. I took off my work boots, sat back on the bed and started flipping through the mail. One letter caught my eye. There were four large letters printed in the upper left hand corner.

  WARM stood for Washington Adoptee Reunion Movement. Inside was a short typed note on letterhead stating that my biological mother would like to meet me. There were boxes to check below the text. Yes, and No. Check yes and I would get a letter from her in the mail. Check no, and that would be the end of it. I lay back on the bed. It had been so long since I’d thought about this. I’d forgotten about it all, buried it somewhere. Outside the window the lights of the city were coming on. I was strangely unaffected, but I was curious, so I checked the yes box and put the form in the return envelope. I sealed it, and put it in the mail the next day.

  A couple weeks later I got another letter. She wanted to meet and included her address and telephone number. What the hell, right? Maybe I could get some answers. Maybe this is one of those things where one door closes and another opens. We arranged to meet in a restaurant in Chinatown. I imagined that meeting her would be like a scene from a movie, that we would instantly have a connection, instantly know things about each other, a kind of perfect moment. I thought I would see myself in her face and know who I was. I was going to meet the woman who I had spent the first nine months of my life inside, a part of her, closer than close.

  She was thin, but aside from that, didn’t look anything like me. I remember her face, I remember the red light from the paper lamps hanging from the ceiling, the candle on the table, flickering. I had a million questions but I couldn’t make any of them come out of my mouth. She did most of the talking. She was about twenty years younger than my other mom, a former beatnik and hippie, a wild child, from what I gathered. Her father had been a Navy Commander in WWII.

  She ordered sashimi, and eventually I was able to talk. I asked her about my biological father. She said he was a man named James, a piano player who lived in town, and gave me his phone number. I asked her about the day I was born. She said she’d hitchhiked to the hospital, that she’d kept her eyes closed after she gave birth. The nurses had asked her if she wanted to hold me for a while and she’d said no, it would be harder to let go. Then quickly she said she couldn’t remember any more, and changed the subject. After dinner, out in her car she asked if I wanted to smoke pot. When I went home that night I felt very weird. How was I supposed to feel about this? Was I supposed to be happy, grateful? Or mad? For the millionth time in my life, it seemed, I was confused.

  A few days later, after about ten attempts I called James. I didn’t know how to say it, but eventually it just fell out of my mouth.

  “Ummm, I’ve been told that you’re my father.”

  There was a long silence, and then I explained.

  “We should meet,” he finally said, after digesting it all.

  We had lunch at a cafe, and he explained to me that it was impossible. He didn’t say he’d never had sex with my mother, but he seemed honest and straightforward and because of that I believed him. Besides, he was a short Jewish guy with dark curly hair. He said I looked like Jack’s kid, Jack Stangle, he was certain of it.

  “Who’s he?” I asked.

  “He and your mom were together for a long time,” was all he said.

  I asked my mother about it, the next time I saw her. She was evasive, and I remember thinking, Fuck. Can somebody give me a straight answer? She tried to change the subject, but I wouldn’t let it go, and finally she said it was true, it was probably Jack. She’d told me it was James because Jack was dead, he’d died the year before, and then gave me some story about how Jack had told her he couldn’t have kids because he’d been hit in the nuts with a baseball when he was a kid or something. I didn’t know what to say. Probably? My head was spinning, and I realized that I was always the last person to find out things about myself. Later, when I was alone, I said it out loud because it sounded so strange in my head.

  “I am always the last person to find out things about myself.”

  It sounded unbelievable. Stupid. How can someone not know anything about themself? Even a rock knows what it is, where it comes from. It was bizarre. Everyone seemed to want to keep the truth from me, as if I was some kind of devil child and if I just didn’t know that I wouldn’t fulfill some kind of horrible destiny. It was absurd, my life just got more and more confusing. The whole thing was too much. I wished I’d checked the box marked No. But I hadn’t, innocently I had stepped in it, and my mother had popped up in front of me and blown up in my face, just like one of those land mines from the Vietnam War.

  My mother and I met occasionally over the next year. My feelings for her never went anywhere, never deepened, she remained a stranger and it was always awkward, but she seemed to be determined to make something of it so I tried to be civil and we seemed to be heading toward some sort of relationship. She gave me a ‘62 VW bus, a camper model she had bummed around in when she was living the bohemian life. It had what looked like an upside-down fiberglass boat on top of it. There was a little kitchen and a bed in the back. She sent me a manila envelope filled with some cardboard road signs she had picked up while travelling in The Middle East. They were written in Arabic and English.

  Stop! No Entry! Border Patrol Road.

  Stop! Da
nger! Israel/Lebanon Border.

  And one, a road sign with an arrow that split off in three directions: Sedom, Mezada, and The Dead Sea.

  Now that I knew about Jack, my mother was very excited to tell me all about him. I don’t know if she actually thought Jack was my father, or was only doing it because he was known in the Seattle art scene, and I didn’t ask. I’d given up asking questions. She sent old newspaper clippings from Seattle papers, from his painting career. One was from The Seattle Times after his death. Not an obituary, but an acknowledgement of his life and work and an announcement that there would be a posthumous show of his art at Foster/ White Gallery. It began, There’s a romantic old notion that ‘serious’ artists set themselves to self-destruct. When it happens, poverty, disillusion and hard drinking most often are the prime destroyers. And later in the article, someone who knew him was quoted as saying, He was flamboyant, and given to doing very anti-social things at parties, things so outrageous they shouldn’t even be talked about. He is the only person my wife ever threw out of our house. The article went on to say, His constant companions, a hunchback and a [blacked out word], went everywhere with him. Often it seemed he deliberately set himself to destroy his relationships with his friends by unprovoked insult and antagonistic behavior. He was, in polite terms, socially difficult. Several gallery owners were reluctant to deal with him, the most prominent of which said he “wouldn’t touch Stangle with a ten foot pole.”

  The article had a photo of Stangle. He looked somewhat like me, tall, thin, lanky, straight hair, fine, blond. I held the article up to the light. I was able to see the word that my mother had blacked out with magic marker. The word was prostitute. Why had she crossed that out? She wasn’t some kind of prude or religious fanatic, she was one of those older hippie types who marries some guy with money, sells out to an upper middle class life of drinking wine, smoking pot, tending an organic garden and pretending to be an artist. Reading New Age self-help books. Taking anti-depressants. Watching the basil grow in her window box. I held the newspaper article up to the light again to make sure I had seen the word correctly. I moved the paper closer until it was about three inches from the light bulb. I hadn’t been mistaken. The word was prostitute.