“My wallet was stolen.” How could I not pay you back? “Look at me,” my face said, “I’m your very own neighbor. I live right across the hall.”
I never ever paid anyone back anything. There were some awkward elevator rides with the neighbors. But money was basically free. I pawned my TV, for example. I still had a couch. There were even some quarters that had fallen under the cushions. So it was hard for me to see money as a really pressing reason to quit.
Still, I started to think vaguely that maybe this couldn’t last. Even in the daytime I thought it. Not when I was going to get high, of course. But once I got high and had a couple hours before I had to start looking for money again. It-can’t-last thoughts started to stick around.
“This can’t last forever,” I told my friend Todd one day. He was the last person from my graduate department still talking to me. He was a junkie too.
“What the hell do you mean this can’t last forever?” he said. His little eyes jumped in and out of his simple, junkie, bare-bones face.
“I just mean that nothing lasts forever,” I said. “Even the president can’t go anywhere he wants. He has to tell his security guards for instance.”
“I’m almost free,” Todd said. “Eight days ago I did half a vial. Seven days ago I did a quarter vial. Six days ago I did one-eighth. I did one-eighth for three days in a row. Then I did a quarter vial by accident. Yesterday I did one-sixteenth. Same today.” He paused and looked at me with unconcealed hatred.
“I’m almost done! I’m almost out! So fuck off!” He sat there gasping at me. A few days later I heard from Henry that Todd had been buying two white tops pretty much every day.
Still, Todd’s little outburst stuck with me.
“He doesn’t even have to think about it,” I said to myself. “He just totally wants to quit.” I found this to be a challenging idea. Todd just absolutely wants to quit? With no doubts? I could hardly believe it.
Not that I thought he was insane for wanting to quit. Not insane, exactly. In fact, when I thought about it, I could think of all kinds of reasons to quit. Some of them were even obvious. Cops, for instance. A cop had stopped me a few days before, and I’d pushed my vials into the air-conditioning vents. He tore the car apart and didn’t find shit. Cops can be stupid as hell.
But there were some other, vaguer reasons. Little things I’d noticed about myself lately. Little disturbing symptoms. A certain heaviness to moving and breathing, for example. The spooky feeling I got looking into the mirror. I started finding odd notes I’d written in the middle of the night. And there was a certain uncanny quietness to sounds. Even loud sounds. A certain…never mind. I was basically fine. What the hell was Todd talking about? I called him up.
“Hey, Todd.”
“What do you want?” He sounded like he had a cold.
“Um, I was just wondering about what you said the other day. I know about all the bad stuff that can happen, and it can’t last forever, et cetera. But is it true that you really want to quit? Really? I mean right now?”
He hung up. I decided that you can never really know what goes on in another person’s head. I needed a second opinion.
“Hey, Henry,” I said.
“Whaddaya want?” he said. We were at Dom’s. Henry was sitting cross-legged on the floor. He was literally counting pennies.
“I’m busy tryyna count these goddamn pennies,” Henry said.
“Henry, have you ever tried to quit?”
“Hell yeah,” he said without looking up. He lifted the pennies one by one from the pile on his right side and dropped them on the pile on his left side. With his one arm, he looked like a crane. A makeshift crane.
“So?” I said.
“So what?” He looked up at me, annoyed.
“So how was it? How was quitting?”
“How the hell does it look?” he grunted and resumed craning the pennies from the right pile to the left.
“It was impossible,” he said. “I’ve tried, of course. Dozens of times. Give my right arm, like they say. Already gave my left. Didn’t work. Hee hee.”
“What do you mean, you can’t quit?” I said over Henry’s junkie giggle. “You can’t quit? You want to quit and you still can’t?”
“It’s impossible, Mike,” he said, straightening up and looking me right in the eye. “After the last time, I promised myself. I’ll never try it again. Quitting chews you up and spits you out, and you are still hooked. It’s impossible to quit. Just forget it. Waste of time to even try.”
I sat shocked and sweating, right there in the middle of a forty-dollar high. I looked at Henry’s one-armed torso. It spoke to me.
“You must change your life,” it said.
“Impossible for a junkie to quit,” he said.
I didn’t have a thousand dollars. So I couldn’t go to the billboard doctor. But my friend Tony K. told me about another place. A certain Dr. Hayes ran a clinic on Maryland Avenue, near the hospital. Tony said they gave you some kind of special medicine that cut the withdrawal in half.
The clinic was called the Center for Addiction Medicine. When I called them, they explained I had to pay one hundred and fifty dollars up front, cash, for the treatment. The rest, they’d bill to me. I happened to have two hundred dollars left from an insurance check I’d gotten to fix my car. I’d run it into a light pole a while back. Too slow on the turn, too slow on the brake. I resolved to go to the clinic and get clean.
The next day, when I woke up, I threw out the “No Dope Today!” sign on my dresser and went and spent twenty on a final white top.
“You’re bad,” I said as I poured those last magic grains out of the vial.
“You little devil,” I told the dope as it went away into me. It was gone. I drove over to the clinic. There were four or five people in the ratty waiting room when I got there.
“Oooh, ooooh, ooooh.” A young black woman rocked back and forth moaning on the threadbare couch. A white guy with a red face and a yellow happy-face T-shirt was talking to the receptionist.
“I. Need. My. Medicine,” he was saying. I shut my eyes and listened to the dope whispering sweetly away inside me.
After twenty minutes or so they called me back. A tired-looking nurse asked me some questions and filled in my answers on a chart.
“How many dollars, on average, would you estimate you spend on heroin per day?”
“Two hundred,” I lied. It was more like eighty, unless I got lucky. But I figured if I said it was more they’d give me more medicine.
“I will now take your payment of one hundred and fifty dollars,” she said. She actually held out her hand. I was surprised. In regular doctor’s offices, it’s a clerk who takes the money. I had a couple sneaky ideas about what to say to avoid paying. But the nurse looked tired. She didn’t look like she was in the mood for sneaky. Plus she had the secret kick-dope medicine right there. I wanted to quit. I was still a little high, and I still remembered. I gave her the money.
Later I realized the reason they made you pay in cash was to discourage people from coming back so many times.
“The medicine we use here is called buprenorphine. It is an opiate agonist. This means that it has both opiate properties—which will help to reduce your withdrawal symptoms—and opiate blocker properties—which will make it hard for you to get high while you are taking it.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not planning to get high. That’s why I’m here.” Duh.
“The program lasts for ten days,” she continued. “We will give you the buprenorphine for three days. That’s the maximum allowed by law. It won’t take away all of your withdrawals, but it will help. We will administer it here, so you need to come here every day to get it. Patients typically like to arrive as soon as we open, which is 8:30 a.m. We will also give you other, nonopiate medications. A high-blood-pressure medication, a muscle relaxant, an antidiarrhea medicine, and Tylenol.”
She handed me a small baggie with the Tylenol and the other worthless pills. She
then gave me a small, square, green lozenge and told me to put it under my tongue and let it dissolve. I looked at it doubtfully. I put it under my tongue.
By the time I got to my apartment I wasn’t feeling so hot. It was about six in the evening now. The windows were open. Soft evening light lit the floorboards; soft summer air ballooned in the thin curtains. They looked so cheap to me, so poor. I felt a sudden twinge of sadness.
Here we go, I thought.
On my coffee table I had two big bottles of water, a bottle of Gatorade, and a little pile of Tylenol and antidiarrhea pills. I hadn’t gone more than twelve hours without dope in over nine months.
I looked at my watch. It had now been eight hours. The electric tension in my legs, the pinpricks of sweat coming out all over my skin, the twist in my guts: I recognized the eight-hour symptoms. I even kind of liked them. In the mornings I’d relish these symptoms, sometimes even putting off my first hit for six or seven minutes. I’d savor the eight-hour burn. It made that first morning hit all the sweeter. Four minutes, five minutes. Bam! That morning dope was like rain in the desert.
But now the pain was different. It wasn’t the pain that comes before a hit. I’d quit. Dopeless. I had the morning pain without the morning hit. That future hit was missing, and the pain was naked without it. I looked at my watch. It had now been eight hours and four minutes since my last, my final hit.
I lay down on my makeshift bed. I pressed my naked burning foot to the cold plaster wall. I got up, swallowed all the pills on the table and lay back down.
Sounds of laughing voices rose from the street below my window. The breeze moved in the thin curtains. The curtains wrinkled with sadness. The sunlight went away on the sounds of the voices, on the bare wood floor of my apartment, on the sad, wrinkled curtains.
Sometime after dark I moved into a new level of withdrawal.
Now I realized that the eight-hour burn was just an inkling. A premonition. I didn’t want to know anything about this.
I shoved myself up against unconsciousness, trying desperately to get in. Sleep. Dreamless, motionless, senseless. It was like the cold plaster wall. I could feel the good absence of feeling on it. I pressed my burning limbs against it. But it was closed. A wall, not a door. I pressed up against it, awake at fourteen hours.
Fifteen hours.
Ever since I was little, I’ve told myself stories to fall asleep. A little cushion of fantasy between waking and sleeping. I lie down and start imagining some pleasant scene. Like I’m on a sailboat in the Caribbean with my friends. Or no, I’m a pirate. Walking on the deck with my sword. I start walking slowly, with big pirate steps. The black metal cannon barrels gleam in the moonlight. Then I notice a fine green parrot has landed on the deck. Its beak has opened. Then I don’t know what else. Then I wake up.
That first night of kicking, I imagined I was living in a castle. A blizzard was raging outside. I’d been trudging though the blizzard, carrying my sword and shield, fleeing the enemy. I knocked on the massive oak door of the castle. I heard the slow sound of the bar being raised and the door swinging open. The friendly warmth rushed out, strong friendly hands pulled me, fainting, inside.
“You must be exhausted,” said a tall, handsome man in chain mail. “Well, everything is going to be fine. We have everything you need in this castle. The walls are strong; the enemy will never get in. And we have enough supplies to last for years in here.” I nodded and tried to smile.
They showed me to a room high in the walls. A big fire roared in the fireplace. A clean, white bed piled deep with cushions lay in the corner. I stood for several minutes gazing at it. I repeated the contents of this room in the castle over and over to myself. I was shivering terribly.
“They also have hundreds of soldiers to protect me,” I told myself.
The red light of my electric clock bled through the thin walls of the castle. 3:22. I reached down to get the bottle of Gatorade on the floor. My abdomen was segmented like an insect’s and the Gatorade was hot like insecticide.
“They have hundreds of soldiers to protect me in this castle. The blizzard rages outside. It is warm and safe and deep inside the castle. I’ll fall asleep now.” But the shivering cold came through the thick castle walls. They had to move me deeper inside the castle, where I’d be warm.
They had to move me again. Deep in the castle’s heart, to a windowless room, with an ancient glowing furnace and a fire burning in the fireplace. They’d never heard of drugs. I heard hundreds of soldiers rushing in the corridors.
“They’re going to their battle stations,” I told myself. I stared at the red digits on the clock. I turned over and over in the bed. My vibrating legs made red electricity. 4:51.
“They’re going to their battle stations.” I invented the name of the enemy. The history of the country. The names of the people in the castle army. “Henry Abelove, Lieutenant.” I counted their weapons. Lieutenant Abelove led me on a tour of their supplies and armaments.
“Here we have the lumber room, where all the lumber for the fires is stored. As you can see, we have enough to last two full years of siege. We will always have enough fuel for warm fires here in this strong, safe castle.”
He showed me the vast hall where they stored the weapons. He told me about the theater the duke had ordered constructed high in the upper keep. He told me the names of the books in the libraries. 5:30. The castle had everything that was needed, all right. I spent hours telling myself about all the good things in the castle. Listing them, counting them.
But something was missing. Despite the plentiful stores of food, everyone in the castle looked starved and crazy. Despite the vast fires, the huge furnaces, the halls piled high with entire felled forests, I could not stop shivering.
“There is no sleep in this castle,” Lieutenant Abelove said sadly.
“But,” I said, “I thought that one first enters the castle, and then passes through into sleep.” He shook his head.
“This entire structure is built along the wall of sleep, but at no point does it penetrate it.” I tried to follow his words.
“Can’t we use some of these weapons, some of this fuel to break through?” He shook his head sadly. I tried to stop thinking about the castle.
“Now I’m on a pirate ship,” I told myself.
I tossed and turned on my bed in a windowless room deep in the heart of the castle. The sleepless armies rushed through the halls on their way to battle stations. They had never heard of dope. They had never seen white-topped vials of dope. Except in the distance, through the castle’s tiny windows.
The white blizzard raged outside, but the strong white sleep couldn’t get in. Sleeplessness was an invincible fortress. It had enough fuel, enough food, enough weapons to withstand two years of siege.
“Sleep can go everywhere but here,” I said, sleepless.
The red numbers of the clock read 7:40. I stood up in pain and slowly drew back the curtains. Red sun erased the red numbers. I struggled into my clothes. The fabric felt like sandpaper. My shirt was soaked with cold sweat by the time I reached my car.
I drove straight out of the castle. I reached the Edmondson Avenue dope spot ten minutes later and gave the runner my last sweat-soaked twenty. The white sun rose at 8:05.
CHAPTER 3
The Future Lasts Forever
Writing is an aid to memory. It helps me to remember what I never experienced. Through this writing, I remember sitting in my car on Edmondson Avenue. The sweat-soaked twenty clenched in the bones of my hand. The ghetto street scene clenched in the bones of my face. Watching for the runner. Shaking.
That moment never existed. I wasn’t there.
Well, I was there, kind of. It’s hard to explain. If you’ve ever looked out at the sea on a clear day you know there is a line where the sea and sky meet. That line doesn’t really exist. It’s an optical illusion. I was there in the car on Edmondson Avenue the way that imaginary line is there between the sea and the sky.
I hung t
here suspended between the first time I did dope and the next time. Between the original eternal white bliss of my first time, and the next eternal white hit. I was the imaginary line that kept those two halves from meeting. Those two heavens. The pressure of all that white bliss above and below, and I was between and thin and imaginary.
Hurry, runner. One white top, please. I’ll do it right here in the car. The way the horizon looks in a thick white fog. I wanted to be there in that car on Edmondson Avenue the way the horizon isn’t there in a white blizzard.
But once that dope hit me I only felt thicker. A thicker barrier between that first-time dope and the next dope that would bring it all back again.
After fixing I watched myself getting fatter there in the car. I wasn’t a line anymore. I was growing thicker and realer by the second as the dope ticked through my heart. Growing arms, legs, eyes, swollen fingers, dirty jeans. I could see my hand in front of my face. There was no white blizzard. I could see the potato chip bags on the floor of my car. The withdrawal was gone, but that was it.
So I was there in my car on Edmondson Avenue after all. I only wanted not to be. I looked at my big hands. I noticed the potato chip bags on the floor of the car. 8:06 in the morning. Eight hours until the eight-hour burn. Twelve hours to the castle. I feel lucky to be writing this now. Writing is a way of not being somewhere. And there’s nowhere I’d rather not be than there.
Writing is an aid to memory. Writing is an AIDS for memory. OK. I drove from Edmondson Avenue right to the Center for Addiction Medicine. It still hadn’t opened by the time I parked and walked up. There was a line of addicts waiting by the entrance.
“Hey, man.” I turned around. A guy around my age in baggy shorts, wearing a gold chain.
White Out Page 4
