by Nick Tosches
I was in. I knew Chiemi. I was no longer a stray pervert set only on getting into those skintight blue jeans. I mean, I was. But not in her eyes, not now. I hoped.
“And what do you do there?” I asked.
“Bookkeeper. Every bit as boring as the movies they make.”
She asked me what I did, and I told her, adding that I hadn’t been doing much of it lately. She said she had heard of two of the books I had written. She didn’t say she’d read them, only that she’d heard of them. That was good enough. This was getting better as it went along. I suggested we stop for some breakfast on the way.
We managed to get a quiet corner table at Locanda Verde. I never used credit cards and I never made reservations, so I never got mistered by name in these joints. But I guess they knew me by face and could match the face with the tips, so they treated me all right. I got the uovo modenese. She got the oatmeal with grappa-stewed fruit, and we split an order of garlic potatoes. She asked for a cup of coffee and was surprised when I didn’t.
“I thought everybody in the program was a coffee junkie,” she said.
I told her that I drank more than my share of coffee, too. But I never drank it unless I could smoke with it.
“Cross-addicted,” she said with a smile.
“Cross-addicted? Vector-field-addicted,” I said with a smile of my own.
As we ate, we talked about this and that—How did she like the potatoes? Did I come here often?—with the customary reserve and politeness of two people conversing for the first time.
I mentioned something that Johnny Depp had told me about the movie business, being sure to use his name but being also sure to glide smoothly and glibly over it, as if the name were nothing more than the equivalent of “somebody” or “this guy.”
“You know him?’
“Yeah. I’m the godfather of his son.”
“What’s he like?”
“He’s a good guy. A really good guy. I liked him better when he was living in France, before he moved back to Hollywood. Probably that’s because I saw more of him then.”
“I didn’t know he had a son.”
“Yeah. Jumpin’ Jack. He’s got a birthday coming up. April ninth, something like that. Getting big. Probably wouldn’t recognize me if he saw me. It’s been that long. Too long.”
I had eaten the same thing for breakfast here many times before. But never had it tasted so delicious. It was another Eucharistic meal. My newly heightened senses had lost none of their keenness.
With my fork I moved some cotechino hash through some egg yolk, raised it to my mouth, chewed it slowly—my only option—then said what I wanted to say. She was in the movie racket, even if she was just a bookkeeper with few kind words to say about the racket. But you never knew with these people. Still, I wanted to say what I wanted to say. In a way, I needed to say it.
“L.A. is a fucking disease. It’s the land of death. It’s like the Egyptians said. The Western Lands. Death.”
I imagined the taste of her blood. I would get no closer to it than that, I was sure: imagining it. That’s why it didn’t matter saying what I said. But who knew? The writer angle. Chiemi. Johnny. The garlic potatoes. Who knew? It was a good breakfast, if nothing else. I was ready to order a cappuccino to go, take care of the check, walk her down the block to where she worked, make a left, and go home.
All of a sudden I saw that she was looking at me—into me—in a way that left it all far behind, as if the morning until this very moment had never been. The writer angle, Chiemi, Johnny, the casual reserve, the breakfast, everything that had transpired or been said. It was as if a mask had suddenly been torn from me, revealing someone, or something, that had lurked behind it. That may have been true. But when my heart slowed, I saw that it was she who had torn the mask from her own face. The beauty of that face was still there. In fact, she looked more beautiful. But her now unsmiling beauty reminded me of the beauty of a big cat in the wild: a leopard daring any other creature to peer into the irresistible splendor of its eyes, at which fatal instant, the instant of eye contact, it would by nature pounce and kill.
The one with magic of her own saw into me and shocked me:
“Do you want it?”
I didn’t know exactly what she was talking about, but I knew that it was drenched with sex. My “yes” remained in me, unsaid. It seemed that neither of us knew quite what was going on here, other than that we were wading in a voluptuous but perhaps dangerous pond away from the light.
“Want what?”
She wasn’t talking about her lithe lovely body. Or rather she was. But her question cut more deeply—devastatingly, astonishingly so—than that. I could sense her looking at me as if she knew my words of ignorance were false. As if she were waiting for me to replace them with truer words.
A thousand things I might say whirled, sped, crashed through my mind. But as I dared a glance into those fatal leopardess eyes, I heard myself say only:
“How did you know?”
“There’s a look,” she said. “It’s haunted me all my life. It was the look in my father’s eyes. I was twelve, almost thirteen, when I first saw it. Maybe it was there longer, but I didn’t see it until then. The night he came into my room, tickled my belly until I was thrashing with laughter, then threw up my pajama top and sank his teeth into me. That was the night I saw it. Fourteen years ago. And every time I see his face in my mind or in my dreams, I see that look on his face.
“He died young. Killed himself. I saw that too. I mean, after he did it. I came home from school, and there he was. Looked sort of like this.” She gestured to what was left of her oatmeal and stewed fruit. “His brains or whatever the hell it was. What a fucking mess.
“I thought it would change then. I thought it would die when he did. But it didn’t. You know what’s funny? I never, ever had a single nightmare about finding him that day. How he looked and all. Nothing. Every time I see his face in my mind, every time he comes to me in my sleep, there it is. That look.
“What he did to me—and it was more than just a few bites—fucked me up good. I’ve never been with another man since him. I’ve tried, but I can’t do it. That’s where the drinking and the drugs came in: to help me break through, to help me break out. But all they really helped me do was drink more and take more drugs. I’m still a virgin. I’m still afraid of that look I once saw for real. It’s haunted me and fucked me up ever since. But at least I never saw it again in real life. Until now.”
I did not know what to say, so I said nothing. Then she asked again:
“Do you want it?”
Those dangerous leopardess eyes now seemed so limpid and vulnerable as to be about to well with tears.
“It shouldn’t be about what I want. It should be about what you want,” I said. “It should be about what’s going to help you.”
I meant every word of what I said. I really wanted to get out of there and have a smoke. I really wanted to feel my cock in her mouth. I really wanted to press myself to that little-girl’s flat-breasted body and be enwrapped in those big-girl’s long lithe legs of hers. And I really wanted the taste and life of her blood. But I meant every word of what I said.
“Help me,” she said, throwing aside the words as if they were rat-ridden refuse of worthless derision to be discarded. “Umpteen kinds of fucking therapy. God knows how many medications. Years of counseling. All this fucking sharing-and-caring program bullshit. Jung. Vibrators. Hypnosis.”
She threw away the phrase “help me” again and slowly shook her lowered head as if grinding the words underfoot. When she raised her head to speak again, tears truly were welling in her eyes.
“That look. You have it,” she said. “But on you that look doesn’t scare me. You seem like a nice guy. I feel some sort of intuitive trust in you. Don’t ask me why. None of this makes any sense.” Then she sniffled, gave a cursory little laugh. “Yeah. You seem like a nice guy who wants to drink my blood. Just like that. The usual stuff at the Norman Roc
kwell soda fountain.”
I smiled gently, and for a moment we smiled together. I wished I had a clean snot rag to offer her to wipe her eyes and blow her nose. That’s what nice guys do.
“Maybe you could get it all out of me,” she said. “Maybe I could break through with you. What could I lose? At this point, not a goddamned thing. The worst thing would be that I ended up running from you. Running right back to where I’ve been for all these years.”
I reminded her that I lived pretty much around the corner from where she worked, and I suggested that she come over when she got out this evening.
“It has to be at my place,” she said. “There are certain things. You’ll see what I mean.”
I never visited anybody. I had got like that slowly over the years. I simply never visited anybody. But something in me stopped me short of laying down this law to her.
“What do you mean, ‘certain things’?”
“Just certain things. I can’t have you bite me. I just can’t go there. So I need certain things.”
“I don’t want to take a blade to you or anything like that,” I lied.
“No knives. But there are certain things that I can enjoy. Certain things that I need. You’ll see.”
“I didn’t think I had any special look,” I said.
“Look at yourself in the mirror,” she said. “Take a good long look. Look at the size of your pupils. No, forget about that. Never mind the size; forget about the size. Look at the color. Your pupils don’t stay black. I mean, yeah, sometimes they’re black and sometimes they turn iridescent, like black pearl. And your irises. Who has eyes that change from blue to brown to gray to green to amber in the course of, what, half an hour? Nobody, that’s who. And it’s what I see in those eyes. You don’t look at me like you’re looking to get into my pants. I know that look like the back of my hand. Men don’t pick up on it. They don’t know there’s no entry. You look at me like what you really want is beneath my skin. I’m not talking about any of that ‘real me’ bullshit. I’m talking about the blood in my veins.”
I did not respond, but simply allowed my silence to let her know that she was right.
“That thing with the eyes. What’s that all about?” I said when my silence was done.
“A lot of molecular stuff. I tried to learn about it once. All I can remember is pigment polymers. Molecules. I’m no doctor. I don’t know. But it’s all molecules. And your molecules are going crazy.”
I ordered a cappuccino to go, took care of the check, lit a smoke as soon as we got outside, walked her down the block to where she worked. We exchanged lingering smiles. I made a left and went home. I was anxious to peer into my own eyes. I thought of the feeling of currents flowing through me that I had experienced lately, and the physical changes I had recently undergone. I thought of her.
I turned on the overhead lamp in my bathroom and pushed to its highest limit the slider on the dimmer switch that controlled the halogen lights to the left and right of the big medicine cabinet mirror. I looked into my eyes.
She was right. Even in the bright artificial light, my pupils were dilated, and I could see them turn from black to an iridescence that was like the shimmering of lustrous clouds in a moonless sky, then once again turn black. But it was the slow-shifting circular rainbow reflected in the membranes of my irises that first frightened then fascinated me.
Sunglasses, I thought. I had a few pairs lying around. I should start wearing them. A shame, I thought, because my eyes seemed less sunken, and the dark bags under them and the wrinkles around them seemed fainter. I mumbled words from one of Ezra Pound’s cantos: “Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.” But vanity seemed part of the pleasure of my restoration to youth.
Those eyes, those fucking eyes. Had they got like this with the improvement in my sight? Molecules, as she said, molecules. All interrelated. There were no eyes like these. Prismic eyes. Magical eyes. The eyes of a fucking god coming into being.
I shut off the lights, sat with my cup of coffee, and lit a cigarette. I reflected on my fine fortune, to have had this new aspect of my metamorphosis, the radiant wonder of my new eyes, brought to my attention not by one of the flotskies at the Reade Street bar, but by her.
It was at that moment, more than three months after I had written him, that I had a call from Olivier Ameisen, the author of the book Heal Thyself, with whom I had been so eager to speak about the power of the drug baclofen to cure alcoholism. Having not heard back from him, I had wondered if he was laid out drunk somewhere. Quite to the contrary, he was in fine fettle and busy as hell, lecturing and trying to raise money for sanctioned testing that would provide the medical establishment with clinical proof of baclofen’s efficacy. He was up against a lot. Baclofen was an old drug, first synthesized in 1962 and long used as a treatment for muscular dystrophy before Olivier’s discovery that it was a cure for addiction. The trouble was, its patent had run out, so the pharmaceutical industry, which controls most of the funding for drug testing, stood to make no money from baclofen, no matter how miraculous-seeming and far-reaching its ability to suppress addictive cravings might be. It was a matter of life or death or the cash register, and the cash register was all that mattered. This problem was compounded by the tendency of those who call themselves “addiction specialists” to wish to perpetuate rather than cure their patients’ addiction. Again, this was simple economics. An addict who was cured of his addiction had no need to weekly feed the pockets of an addiction counselor, who thus preferred prescribing far less effective medications, such as naltrexone and topiramate, or even medications such as acamprosate that have been shown to be no better than placebos. Baclofen had an astounding success rate, well over ninety percent, better than the failure or relapse rate of any other known treatment.
My desire to take baclofen was now somewhat less compelling than it had been when I first reached out late last year. I was, after all, no longer drinking. And the dysphoria—a part of the underlying chemistry of addiction also alleviated by baclofen—that once had darkened my days had also been lifted by my regeneration. But at the same time, I had just witnessed and knew how deeply and insidiously alcoholism was ingrained in me. If I wanted to enjoy my new life, I must remain sober. Baclofen could do me no harm. It could only enhance and protect what other, more mysterious if no less complex chemistry had already brought about.
We talked a long time, and I grew more and more impressed with him, his knowledge, and his goodness as our talk went on. He was calling from Paris, on his own dime and time; and he spoke more like a human being than a medical doctor, and communicated scientific and other unsimple matters so well that I had to remind myself that English was to him a second language. We concluded by discussing the best way I could go about getting a prescription for baclofen in New York, this city he knew well and in which he had practiced cardiology, this city whose medical establishment was so inimical to baclofen as a treatment for addiction. Was there some hospital, some institution, some doctor he knew? He asked me if I had an internist, a personal general practitioner, whom I trusted. I told him that I did. He said to go to him, and if he cared about me, if he gave a damn whether I lived or died, he would give me the necessary prescription. I told him that I would make an appointment with my doctor and send a copy of Olivier’s book along with a letter via FedEx overnight. I promised to call Olivier after the appointment to tell him how I fared.
I called my doctor’s office and asked for the next available first appointment of the day. I never visited doctors unless it was their first appointment of the day. I was lucky. There was one open in less than two weeks. I got down my copy of Olivier’s book and hastily wrote a letter addressed to my physician:
I am hoping that you will have a chance to look at this book.
I had a long transatlantic conversation yesterday with the author, Olivier Ameisen, who is presently in Paris.
Since reading this book, and especially after speaking with Olivier, I have been convinced that the
baclofen treatment he propounds is the only effective treatment for alcoholism.
He told me that if I had a personal physician whom I trusted and whom I felt cared about my fate, I could then easily obtain the necessary prescriptions.
There has never been an adverse reaction to, or negative effect of, this drug, which is believed to be safer than aspirin, and whose dosages are simple to establish.
I sent Olivier a detailed list of the medications I take, including the Valium, and their dosages, and he assured me that there was not the slightest risk of interaction with any of them.
Olivier said that if you should have anything you should wish to ask him, you should feel free to do so. He can be reached at the number you will find on the inside front page of the book. He also said that you could find his papers online at PubMed.
I have an appointment to see you a week from this coming Friday, and I am hoping that by then you will have had ample opportunity to review this material.
I apologize for the length of this letter, but this is extremely important to me.
I wrote down Olivier’s number where I said it would be, then read through the letter as hastily as I had drafted it. The grossly grammarless phrase “whom I trusted and whom I felt cared” was set aright, to “whom I trusted and who I felt cared,” and the should-dense mess of “if you should have anything you should wish to ask him, you should feel free to do so” was recast so that only one should remained. There was a time when I would not have made such slovenly mistakes, not even in slipshod haste. I had gone far too long without writing. Far too long. I felt like an imbecile, and I denounced myself for it. Then the god in me rebuked me for this, telling me that I had caught and fixed my errors as quickly as I had committed them, and negligences such as this had probably always crept into my writing without my even being aware of them. At least this time my awareness was sharp and quick. I would err no more. My heightening sensibilities would see to that.
