She meant that her whole fucked-up body and mind was making the group and everyone in it stronger and more relaxed, including her. But not her more than anyone else. Not more than me for instance. She smiled and was quiet.
After a moment an obese woman with an “I Love My Home Group” button began to speak.
“My name is Ebony, and I’m an addict.”
“Hi, Ebony.”
“Lord! I am grateful to be here at my home group tonight. I get excited when it’s my home group. I wake up and I say, ‘It’s Wednesday today; I’m going to my home group tonight.’” She shuffled around in her folding chair and fanned herself with one of the readings.
“I been through it this past week, y’all. And some of you in this home group know that. Y’all helped me get through it. Your love and support. I won’t never forget that. It was my sister’s service this week. It was the first time I been together with my whole family since I been clean. Now, I have never in my life gotten together with my family and not been high. And I did not get high this week. I did not have the desire to get high this week. I did not have the thought to get high. And I am grateful for that.
“But you know, my whole family came down. People coming from Georgia and Tallahassee. Aunts and uncles and you name it. And you know some shit had to happen.” She shook her head and we laughed.
“I love my family but you know I hate they guts and only here in this group can I say that. ’Cause there’s no hate in here. And it makes it easy and makes me not ashamed the way I feel about my family. Because in here it’s all good. Like you was my family. No you better than family. The group, the NA group. People in here you ain’t got to convince of nothing. Group people. I’m just saying this just to be saying. Like I was to talk about how I could cut my uncle’s ears off with a butter knife. It don’t matter. I ain’t have to use no drugs, and when I called some of the people here on the phone when I felt crazy with my family every minute under my damn feet, y’all answered.
“If you sitting here new in recovery, what you need to know is that there is a lot of love here. And I love every single one of you. It don’t matter who you are. I love you. The love here is strong. I felt it the first time I came to this meeting. This room, these chairs. That table Sandra sitting at. I still feel it. The love in this room is strong. Helen. My heart is full here tonight. And this home group has a special feeling here tonight. And it does have a special feeling every time I come here. And I will keep coming back.”
I noticed that all the tension had drained from my body.
The basket had been sent around, and a voice out of the group told us that the group had collected nine dollars and fifty cents to help with expenses. It told us if we didn’t have any money don’t worry about it and keep coming back to the group. Like Soviet communism, NA has many slogans, each with a strange potency. “Don’t Pick It Up and It Won’t Get in You” is a charm against mind devils. “One Day at a Time” is a charm against the devils of time. But “Keep Coming Back” is the master slogan. So is “Meeting Makers Make It.”
We got up and stood in a circle with our arms around each other while someone recited the Serenity Prayer. Ebony was to my right. A guy with a tattoo of a knife on his neck was to my left. His eyes were closed. He was wearing a button that said “I Love My Home Group.”
I closed my eyes. The love here is strong. I stood in the circle with the waves of it vibrating in my skull and my legs and my tongue. Twice a week at least I stand up and get exposed to the love rays of the group. It disperses the hard lines of my body. The thought lines shift, waver, and melt.
That love isn’t the kind of love where you need to know a whole lot about the people you are in love with either. What they look like, even. It doesn’t really have a lot to do with the people. When it’s really strong, the people blur in it. Like Ebony said, it seems to come more from a place, a room, a day of the week, than from the people who come in the room alone from the endless eviscerated capitalist century outside, and who go out alone later.
In that room the hard strange surfaces of Florida opened. Gold spray paint and Jesus and Mariah Carey and linoleum lined the opening. The group stood in the circle together and when I looked across into Helen’s open eyes it wasn’t like looking at someone. It wasn’t hard like that.
I drove back up the highway with the windows down and the love slowly fading. Past tenements and shopping malls. Orange clouds hung in the hot black sky. I’m past thirty now. As I drove I remembered another night. In Baltimore right after I’d moved there. Eva and I were high, driving fast, Guns N’ Roses on the stereo. Laughing. I smiled, remembering. Wondering also why still. And for how long. Eva’s eyes, the streetlights through the windows. Surfaces less solid than smoke. How long can they last? How long will they keep coming back? It already seems like centuries.
I drove fast, remembering the Baltimore billboards, the humid trees, Eva’s floating hair. Remembering how the lights came on in the heavy Baltimore night. I was watching what I was doing as I drove but I wasn’t. I wasn’t really seeing the Florida highway as it curved up over the buildings and into the orange and black sky. The Chevys with chrome rims and green tints passing me, the neon palm tree signs over the bars below. I wasn’t really seeing them.
Memory reached through my not-seeing and stole them all. While I was thinking about the past, the surface of the present disappeared into memory. The hot black sky, the Chevys, the road curving up over the buildings.
One day the surfaces taken by memory will be all I have to recognize myself by. The face I will have when I am gone.
CHAPTER 13
26th and California
I’ll know me by the color. Drifting snow covered the short West Side blocks. It came halfway up the windows of the parked cars. They looked like the squinting eyes of white people. Clear irises. Day and night coming through them. Thirty days and nights coming down with the snow. I’m on my hands and knees in it, looking for a white bag of dope in front of two cops. In the white dust of the world, like a myth. The people yelling:
I don’t believe it! Hey, smart guy, get your ass back over here.
On my hands and knees right in front of the people. Looking through the snow for the dope I dropped when the “here come the people” cries rang out.
Can you believe this damn junkie, Carl? I’m sifting through the white dust. Chicago, December 2001. Drifting white dust piled up to the windows. And everything I wanted. Everything I could have wanted turned to dust. Because the dope had stopped working. The dope had begun to malfunction. I don’t know when. Maybe a month before. Maybe a year. My mind wasn’t right.
Consider what dope is. Information. Processed by the brain. Dope molecules carry information to brain receptors. Heroin isn’t some simple poison like cyanide. It doesn’t turn off your kidneys. It isn’t some raw sense pleasure like sugar. It doesn’t make your mouth happy. What makes you happy? Sun? Sunlight on a day when you feel like good things will happen? The beach? Like a honeycomb full of the honey of beach memories. The street you used to live on? Shadowed by a memory so early it doesn’t have any shapes. It sheds dark drops of light on you, on the present-tense sidewalk.
What makes you happy? Dope goes to the brain. The polymorphous brain. The brain is the multiform possibility of happiness. It has roots that reach through time and drink from everywhere. The poet Hafiz wrote in the fifteenth century that wine doesn’t make us drunk. We make the wine drunk in us. The happiness is mine, the memories are real. Dope is a connection. From past to present. From over there to over here. The connection lights up as past happiness pours through it and bubbles up now. Heroin is an interface with the brain’s infinite happiness. Heroin is a white screen. All of memory’s wonderful shapes projected onto it.
Heroin molecules are delicate. Complex. Hundreds of thousands in a twenty-dollar vial. As they pass through the envelope of my blood and hit the white heat of the chemical brain fire, they crystallize into the basic forms of pleasure. The alphab
et of happiness. The code of memory. Time, sensation, places, and faces processed through the dope code. “There” passes through dope to reach “here.” “Then” passes through dope to reach “now.” After a year or so my brain can’t imagine how it ever got by without it. Its natural roots die and the dope system takes over. Chip’s roof, Eva’s eyes, Baltimore sunlight gets mixed with fields in Burma, planes landing in the desert, dealers’ phone numbers, prices of vials. I’m woven in. Thought feeling and memory come through on the dope signal.
So when dope stops working it is catastrophe. An invisible comet explodes in the atmosphere. A flash, and all the world’s processors turn into ash. All the world’s alphabets pulverized. The world covered with a thin layer of fine bone-white dust. With tiny mutilated bits and pieces of alphabets. Meaningless. For months after the catastrophe, the pulverized information snows down.
When dope stops working it isn’t just a problem with the dope. The junkie brain doesn’t think, We’ll just have to find other ways of being happy. Dope isn’t a kind of happiness for a junkie, one kind among many. It is the code that makes happiness possible. Impossible. Dope malfunction. Information decay. I walk out into the sunlight and the raw matter stretches forever. Meaningless.
I don’t believe it! Hey, smart guy, get your ass right back over here.
The senseless world of terminal addiction. No taste left in food. No color left in color, no sound left in sound. No dope left in dope. This was not a feeling I had; it was my world. The real world. There were telephones and sidewalks in it. People. Family members. Long and short distances. Moving my fingers over the familiar shapes like a person newly blind.
“You could smile a little when you see us, Michael. It’s been months.”
“I’m sorry, Dad, I just feel a little…tired. I need to borrow your car for a minute.”
I still knew enough to get more dope. It’s not a feeling exactly. More like an instinct. A primitive sense about where feeling might be found. The way blind tadpoles burrow into moist sand. I burrowed like that into the white dust on the West Side of Chicago. They call dope bags “blows” there. They call cops people. I was sifting through the dust in the bags. Through the pulverized alphabet of feeling. Patiently trying to puzzle the broken letters into one real word. Sleep for instance. Ah. There. No. Not yet. Finally doing enough to reach the simple physical properties of dope. The toxicity level. The off switch. Little overdoses every night. Like using a cell phone as a hammer.
But sometimes, from a distance, that first white bliss still flamed in the white grains of a new bag. I rushed back to my car with the dope clenched in the sweat of my hand. I opened it to find that the first time had left its angel shape in the white dust. Like a snow angel. In my dreams a white phone was ringing.
I met Tiger two weeks before the bust, when I was trying to score down by the old Cabrini-Green projects. These were their last days. The buildings were half-deserted. Scheduled to be demolished for condos. The drug trade was dying in the emptying projects, but you could still catch a dealer here and there. The trade was different in Chicago. Not like free-market Baltimore, where anyone who could get fifty bucks together bought a few bags and stood out on the corner. In Baltimore you pull up and twelve different dealers run up pushing and shoving to serve you. Every one an independent operator.
In Chicago the gangs had the trade locked down. The gang lookouts, paranoid of my whiteness, turned me away from the gang superspots. So I had to catch the stray desperate independent dealers. They were hard to catch, running fast from the cops, the gangs, and the junkies they’d burned.
Tiger was watching me as I got burned by an independent I’d cornered in the park. The dealer split. I opened the bag and flicked my tongue at the tasteless baking soda.
“Hey man,” he said as I walked away dropping the burn bag and biting my cheek. “Hey man, hey man, hey man.”
“What?” I said turning.
“I seen you want some blows,” he said.
It was late December. Four o’clock, when the white of the day stands out.
“No not blow, dope,” I said exhausted.
“Yeah, blows,” he said.
“No. Heroin. Not blows.”
“Blows, man.”
“Heroin yes, blow no.”
“Yes heroin, yes blows,” he said. “We call heroin blows.”
“Oh,” I said. “I’ve been out here all day not knowing what to say to people.”
“We call cops people,” Tiger said. “Come on I’ll take you to the lady I shop with.”
We got in my beat-up Pontiac and rolled up Roosevelt. Of course I had to buy Tiger one. I wasn’t familiar with the Chicago trade. It was better to give Tiger ten bucks than risk getting burned again. Plus the people were everywhere. The heat made the lady he shopped with keep everything in her panties. Her shop was in her panties. I like to shop with you, I thought.
We fixed in the abandoned project apartment Tiger was squatting in. The first brief flash of dope light blew the dust off my senses. The light lasted for sixty seconds. I had just enough time to look around. I noticed Tiger was a middle-aged black man wearing a Bears coat and orange mittens. Then I had a couple more seconds to see what was happening to me and to panic a little. Then it was gone. The facts and the colors were still there but my interest was gone. The dope was barely working anymore.
“It ain’t much,” Tiger said.
“Yeah.” I said. “I’m getting off it anyway.”
“Oh, I hardly fuck with it,” he sniffed. “So where you stay at?”
“I’m visiting my family,” I said. “Right now I’m staying with my sister up on the North Side. Roscoe Village.”
“Oh yeah,” he said. “It’s nice up there. I got a auntie who lives up near there. Up near the Cubs stadium.”
“I live in Baltimore,” I said. “I just came here to, you know. Baltimore is bad. Um. I think I need a little more if you don’t mind.”
“I’ll join you,” he said.
I couldn’t help but notice the extremely miserly way he handled his drugs. I’d only bought him one ten-dollar bag. I got three for me. I did a whole one right off, and now I was going to hit another. He took out the bag I’d bought him, which I saw to my wonder was still almost full. He shook out a very few grains. If I were quicker, I thought, I could have counted them.
I’d heard of fiends like this before. But I’d never met one. It defied common sense. Dope costs money. I always thought that once my money ran totally dry I’d have to kick. That would be it. A solid bottom to the disease. But look at Tiger. Even being dead broke and homeless didn’t get you off the hook. The disease could string you along on a few grains a day.
How little money could the disease survive on? Ten dollars a day? What about three dollars? Fifty cents? I watched Tiger shake out his few grains from the bag. He smiled over it with that nasty junkie look, seeing his first time glowing in the powder. It was worse than watching an old man look at porn. Much worse. There was barely enough dope there to see anything in. I could never get clean.
“I’m going to school,” he said.
“Same with me,” I said.
When I got back in my car the radio said it was eight degrees out. My fingers were slow. I got scared for a few seconds as the new dope fell through the brain slot and I saw I was kind of dying. But it was only for a few seconds. Then the dope light went out and I could see normally.
I could see death like I could see the color of my shoes. Like I could see the other side of the street. It wasn’t weird or scary. The other side of the double yellow lines on the highway. It’s like walking across a room. You get to your chair and you stop and sit down. But before you sit down, you think, I can keep walking. Or I can stop. If I stop, I’m here. If I keep going, I’m over there. There’s no big mystery.
But it is often easier to compose your mind on the big questions—like death—than it is to successfully complete everyday tasks. My experience provides plentiful eviden
ce of the truth of this statement. I had a little trouble when I got back to my sister’s from Tiger’s, for example. It was hard to find a parking space. I parked on the crowded part of the block, where I knew I shouldn’t. Sure enough, when I got out my car was sticking out over the sign that says no parking. I’d learned to expect the worst from those signs.
I got down on my haunches and looked hard. Was I over the line or not? Expect the best, but plan for the worst. What would be the worst? If they came by and chopped the car off right at the line where the sign was, it’d still drive. Maybe. But better safe than sorry. I got back in the car and tried to back up some more. I tried to fit ten inches into two inches, so to speak. Like fitting a twenty-ounce Coke into an eight-ounce glass. You can almost do it, if you pour slow and careful. Very careful, very slow.
When I got back out of the car, things were in a bad way. I was bleeding a little bit. The car was still over the line. And I absolutely had to take my depression medication. I didn’t mean maybe. Emergency! I’d forgotten to take it for maybe two days. I didn’t know if I could park the car again without it. That depression medication was really helping me. I didn’t even feel whatever had started me bleeding, for example. That was just one example. The medicine was called Zoloft. It was also helping me kick dope. I’d been taking it for two years. It wasn’t the fastest-working drug in the world. Slow but steady. You don’t know anything about science. I believed in it.
When you go for a couple days without Zoloft, it reminds you with a little “ping” in your head. It’s not like dope withdrawal or anything. But it isn’t pleasant. It’s like someone tapping you lightly on the back of your head. You turn around too fast and you fall down. No one is there but the ghost of Zoloft.
I got up off the snow where I had fallen. I got back in the car. The place I’d parked it in was too small for it but it didn’t seem to want to get out of it. Get out of it! When I got to the drugstore I saw I didn’t have my prescription with me. Or they made me see, rather.
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