It couldn’t hurt. My habit had gotten a little out of control. I’d been self-medicating to control my disappointment at my advisor’s lack of support. I was disappointed in Cat too. And now my fellowship checks, frequent supplemental checks from my father, and a whole lot of stealing were no longer enough to support my habit. My habit was on crutches. I needed a change. I went to Chicago with ten bags of dope and one bag of hope.
The second day I was there I sat in my father’s living room watching TV with him. The dope I’d brought with me was already gone, and I could feel withdrawal starting in the gooseflesh of my legs. I decided today was not the right day to kick.
“Hey, Dad,” I said. “I think I might, you know, go out for a little while.”
I stood up.
“It’s my birthday,” he said, looking up at me.
“I know it’s your birthday. I’ll be back soon.”
“Where are you going?”
This wasn’t like him, I thought. He was usually so easygoing.
“I want to get something to eat,” I said.
“There’s food here.”
“I feel like a hamburger,” I said.
“There’s hamburger meat here.”
“Dad, come on, I’m just going out for a bit. I’m twenty-six, you know.”
He looked at me.
“Michael,” he said. “I don’t ask you for much, do I?”
“No, Dad,” I said.
“I help you out with money when you need it?”
“Of course, Dad, I’m very grateful.”
“I don’t ask for much?”
“No, Dad, you really don’t.”
“Well,” he said. “I’m asking you for one thing now. This is my birthday. And I want you to stay here with me today on my birthday.”
“And not leave the house at all?” I asked.
“Just this one day,” he said.
I shifted from foot to foot.
“Dad, I—”
“Just this one day,” he said.
He was facing the TV again now, an angry look on his face.
“Dad, I—”
“Go on,” he said.
“I, um—”
“Go on!”
I left.
You might think that my father knew. That my advisor knew. That Cat knew. But they didn’t, not at that time. I know they didn’t, because when they did finally find out, they were all surprised. Of course, they told me, they’d known something was wrong. They didn’t know quite what it was, but they got a funny feeling around me. Something a little off, that they couldn’t put their finger on.
Naturally, I was careful. If I had to be around people who I didn’t want to know about my habit, I used great care. Showers. Clean shirts. And just enough dope to keep the withdrawal away. So it wasn’t obvious, unless you knew what to look for. And most people don’t. So my family, my professors, my old friends noticed only a slight souring of the space between them and me.
Of course, there was probably a healthy helping of denial on their side. People don’t want to think someone close to them is a heroin addict. They want to be fooled. So they collaborated with me, in a way, in hiding it from them. Not asking me certain questions. Suggesting excuses. “You look tired. You must be tired.” But part of them remained unfooled. Their senses, their bodies, their eyes startled and shied away from me. Like horses shy away from vampires. I noticed it.
After I got clean, I asked my friend Cash, who I’d had intermittent contact with all the way through my junkie days, if he knew.
“No, man,” he said, “I had no idea.”
“Well you must have thought something was up with me,” I said. “I mean, you had to have noticed something.”
He thought for a while.
“Sure I noticed something,” he said.
“Well, what?”
“I just thought you’d turned into a complete asshole,” he said. “It happens, you know.”
In Chicago the street name for police is “people.”
“Look out for the people.”
“Did you see the people?”
After my father’s birthday, I’d decided to stick around, wait for the right time to kick. But the right time never came, and instead of spending my days kicking in my father’s basement, I spent my nights there, writing “Don’t Do Dope” signs. Really tiny ones, so my stepmother wouldn’t find them. Really good ones. “Don’t Do Dope” matchbook scraps. “Don’t Do Dope” on a half-inch piece of McDonald’s napkin, with fancy designs on the Ds. I got so good I could write “Don’t Do Dope” twenty times on the back of a stamp.
I spent my nights writing. I spent my days copping dope in the projects on the Near West Side of Chicago. Ogden Courts. Roosevelt. The shells of Cabrini-Green. Moving fast. Ducking the people. At 10:00 a.m. about a week after Christmas, I was standing in a dope line, doing a little dance to keep warm.
“The people will be here soon,” the little gangster said as I got to the front. His eyes moved in the ski mask’s eyeholes, his leg jumped in the ten-degree morning, he handed me two baggies.
“The people was here twenty minutes ago,” said the lookout as I passed him.
“The people are getting close,” said a woman, standing in the breezeway with a tiny kid on her arm, sniffing the air.
“The people are here,” the glassy junkie next to me said.
He dropped his dope and went right. I dropped my dope and went left. The people started coming through the tenement’s modernist archways.
There is deep folk wisdom in calling the police the people. None of us were people. In our world the human shape dissolves. The apparatus of the state is required to prop up the human form.
“Here come the people!”
I moved along the wall, face melting in the heavy wind of no-dope.
“Hey, you there!”
I kept moving.
“Are you fucking deaf? I said stop.”
I stopped. Only the people expect you to take these face noises seriously. I turned my hole toward the people. The people swiveled their human faces toward me.
“OK. Where’s the dope?”
“I don’t have any.”
“We’ll see about that.”
A big person came over and started patting me down, going through my pockets, feeling under my belt and in the tops of my socks. My human flesh materialized under the hot people fingers. When it took its hand back I sagged formlessly against the tenement wall. The person grabbed me by my human shoulders and looked into me.
“Where is the dope? Look at me when I’m talking to you.”
I tried. I was out of practice.
“I said look at me!”
It wasn’t just my lifestyle, either. Evolution has made these face-to-face meetings obsolete. Unnecessary. Unpleasant. In the distant tribal past all communication took place in face-to-face encounters. Then came drums, money, drugs, writing. Panic and desire sounded through jungles in drumbeats. Panic and desire dispersed across continents in markets and caravans. Panic and desire dispersed across time through white molecules of opium. Humanity received new, possible bodies. Communication spread beyond the face-to-face.
Since then, direct communication between people-heads in the present has been mainly used for religious and police purposes.
“Please place your right hand on the Bible and repeat after me.”
“You may now kiss the bride.”
“Look at me when I’m talking to you. Where is that goddamn dope?”
The people seemed to enjoy my confusion. They flaunted the expensive obsolescence of face talking.
“See,” they seemed to say, “we’ve got so much time and money we can afford to just stand here talking to your face.”
But when they really want to know, they don’t stand around talking into faces. When narcotics agents want to measure the effectiveness of their policies, they buy a bag of dope. They listen to the price. A high price means they’re winning a little, a low pr
ice means they’re losing a little.
When the dealers want to control an area, they spiral out through cell phones, little scraps of paper with digits written on them, numbers on high school bathroom walls, U-Hauls and station wagons, color-coded vials.
And when the junkies want to travel through time, when they want to erase the present by joining the immaculate white past and the immaculate white future—the way you fold a sheet in half—they buy a bag of dope.
Dope is information. Just like prices on objects or the code traveling through fiber-optic cables. The dope molecules carry information to the brain’s memory glands, where time is manufactured. At every instant the addict inhabits at least two times at once: the first time he did it and the next time he will do it. Right now is the switchboard.
What is true of time is also true of space. At every instant the addict is in several different places at once. Blood circulates within the borders of the skin. But the addict’s need for dope opens his mind-body system to the world. To the circulatory system of the world dope supply. The addict’s veins and nerves spool out through prices on bags, fiber-optic cables where dealers’ voices peel away from their bodies, airplanes landing in empty fields. The dope body spreads out like an open fire hydrant.
So when the people stand looking at the addict face-to-face, they don’t see much. They don’t expect much. An addict doesn’t fully materialize in the present. When I looked in the mirror back in Baltimore, I got an odd feeling that I wasn’t really seeing myself. Because I wasn’t really seeing myself.
The people looked at me. They snorted in disgust.
“OK, beat it!”
They turned their bright people faces off me. I walked back over to where I’d dropped my dope when I’d first heard the people sounds. I felt the people faces sweeping the area, lighting up the dirty pavements and graffiti pillars. My dope lay in a shallow crack of shadow between two long people looks. I bent over and pretended to tie my shoe. I picked up the bag, stood up, and walked off quick.
“I don’t believe it. Hey, smart guy! Get your ass right back over here.”
I dropped the dope again and turned slowly around into the sharp human facelight.
“You just couldn’t help yourself, could you? Carl, go pick up that bag he just dropped. Unbelievable. No willpower at all.”
Addiction has nothing to do with willpower. It took enormous willpower to pick up that dope right in front of the people. If anything, the problem is too much willpower.
“I said come back over here! Damn, Carl, it’s like talking to…hello,” the person waved his hands in front of my eyes, “is anybody at home? Is anybody in there?”
Now he was getting warmer. Because, of course, I wasn’t really in there. To pass through addiction is to come to terms with not being where you are. More and more people are entering the modern world by passing through addiction. Perhaps in the future everyone will have to pass through. Like a gateway. Leave your human body on this side, and pick up your possible body on the other.
“Are you listening to me, junkie?”
Kind of. But the people like you to be all there. 100 percent there. They’re old fashioned. They like to look at you and know.
“Gimme your wallet. All right, let’s see here…Michael Clune. That your name, junkie?”
So they took me to jail. Jail is kind of like a forest preserve. It’s a space for preserving a form of life that mostly died out long ago. A life form without connections. Without money or dope or cell phones. The people like to see you down there in the jail. You remind them of people. All the junkies and dealers standing around in the bullpen talking to each other like people. Biting on each other like people. Like the people.
They brought me and the other one in and talked to us in separate rooms. They were trying to find out something about some dealer called “Rabbit.”
“Is Rabbit the one who sold you this shit?”
“Is Rabbit still around here?”
“Does Rabbit wear a red bandanna?”
“Is Rabbit the guy we picked up with you?”
I answered yes to all the questions. Especially the last one.
“Yes!”
I’d known the guy a few weeks. I liked him. Black guy in his forties. Always complaining about the cold. His street name was “Tiger” or something. Some name a six-year-old would pick. I’d never heard of Rabbit. I knew the guy busted with me wasn’t him. The people probably knew too. But I thought it was important to demonstrate my complete willingness to rat anybody out at any time. I could imagine what the people would say.
“You know, Carl, I was wrong about that kid,” one person would say. “I think we got us a real good one here.”
“We sure do,” the other one said. “I mean, if he’s willing to rat out his friends for things they haven’t even done, just think what he’d do if he actually met someone who did something!”
“Maybe he’s worth more to us free,” the first one said. “Maybe we should turn him loose. Give him some money. A car. A badge.”
“Maybe some dope, too. I mean, he’s got to blend in…”
“Yes, he’s Rabbit,” I said again. “He’s a big-time dealer.”
But the people didn’t commission me as a secret narcotics agent. They lost interest in my answers even before they finished asking the questions. People are like that. Easily distracted. Sometimes they get depressed all of a sudden. The people who’d been questioning me kind of sat back mumbling to themselves. I think they were talking about New Year’s. It was New Year’s Eve.
“And then Molloy calls in sick and who do they bring in but me. Any other night of the year, fine. But this is New Year’s Eve and my girl is…”
“Yeah, Carl. Well today I was sitting in my squad car and got the call…”
“I have tomorrow night off, but right now I gotta…” Now. Today. New Year’s Eve. This was the talk of people confined to a single time and place. The talk of the people. Finally, they seemed to remember me.
“OK, it’s back to the cell with you, buddy.”
At least they called me buddy. That was a small victory.
“You know,” I told my buddy as he was walking me down. “I’m really going to quit this time. This arrest is just what I needed. Soon I’ll be a person again.”
“Yeah whatever,” he said. “That’s what they all say.”
He was right. The cure doesn’t turn junkies into people. Who would give up dope for that?
CHAPTER 12
Love
That was eight years ago, in Chicago. Hey, smart guy! Get your ass right back over here.
These days I follow the law. Almost eight years off dope. I even go to NA meetings now. I finished my dissertation five years ago. Got a job in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan three years ago. Now I’ve moved again. I’m living in Florida as I write this. No shirt, no shoes, no service. I think they have a law against feeding the alligators, too, but that’s about it. And no one follows the first law except me. Only me. When I get out of bed in the morning, I put on my shirt. Then I put on my shoes. Then I ask for service.
While I was in Ann Arbor, I finished the introduction to my academic book, and a university press gave me a contract for it. I went on the job market and got flown out to a few different campuses to give job talks.
At one of them, a prestigious department at a great university on the West Coast, my old friend Cash tried to kill me. He didn’t succeed, obviously. It’s an open question how hard he really tried. He was drinking a lot of Robitussin, for one thing. A lot. He had gotten hold of some guns somehow—aren’t felons supposed to not have guns?—but his ability to use them was questionable. It’s a long story. When I got back from California, I withdrew my candidacy with a shiver of relief, and ignored the shocked and angry emails from the faculty there. And the demented and angry emails from Cash.
My hopes of leaving Michigan dwindled. An Ivy League school flew me out for an interview, but they ended up giving the job t
o someone else. I was number two. I watched the Michigan snow pile up.
Then, out of the blue, I got this great offer from a university in Florida. Good money. Low cost of living, better weather. Not very prestigious, but big things were happening down there. When they flew me down to the campus, the chair told me all about it.
“The state has made a big commitment to the university, Michael,” he said. He was smiling. “Our department is currently rather small, but it has just received a tremendous amount of money. You will be the first of an anticipated thirty new hires. If you come here, you will have an opportunity to shape the growth of this department into a powerhouse in the discipline. You will have a degree of input enjoyed by few junior faculty anywhere.”
I like the sun. Ann Arbor has fewer sunny days than Seattle. I signed on the line. I flew down again in April and got a great place in a cool part of town. In early summer I said my good-byes to my friends in Michigan, the movers picked up my stuff, and I drove down to meet them. I like driving. Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia. It got hotter.
Soon after crossing into Florida I stopped and got some gas. It was hot as hell. I went inside the store and got a twenty-ounce Coke. I went to the counter and the lady rang it up.
“Sixty cents,” she said.
Only sixty cents? I looked at the bottle. It seemed perfectly good.
“Really?” I said.
“Sixty cents,” she repeated.
Why did they feel like they couldn’t charge at least a dollar for it? Every other state I drove through did. Even Kentucky. I looked at the lady behind the counter.
“Sixty cents?”
She smiled weakly back.
In Florida they just don’t have the confidence to charge a dollar. “Who do we think we are?” they say. Sixty cents. That wasn’t a good sign. They don’t have any state income tax either. I picked up a couple newspapers and scanned the headlines.
STATE SLASHES UNIVERSITY FUNDING
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