Christodora

by Tim Murphy

  And that’s when that slow free fall into the drug H had begun—at Oscar’s party after the last day of school, then intermittently throughout that summer before college. Just when his life was more or less his for the making. He really didn’t understand it, how inevitable it felt that he’d go into that free fall. But he also didn’t want to understand it. It felt like a gift, a solution, beyond the need for understanding. It made him feel like he was finally where he’d wanted to be his whole life—very far away.

  True, Hector had gotten him smoking the stuff—those long, infinitely serene sessions with Hector, the becalmed dog, the shadows of feet passing by the curtained window in the filthy basement apartment. And it was after the second or third smoking session with Hector that he started to feel truly dopesick for the first time, the onset of what felt like the flu from hell, a shaking, sweating fetal-position misery tinged with a panicked need to get more H to cut the sick. In one of those sick spells, not at Hector’s, who’d left town to spend the winter at some friend’s empty apartment in Palm Springs, but at a using friend of a using friend’s place in Jersey City, he’d let someone shoot him up for the first time—a fucking pimply New Jersey high-school kid named Eddie!—and in that moment, he relinquished that bit of mental dignity of the user who tells himself that he can control things, that there is a line he hasn’t crossed. I’m a slave to this, he thought, not with horror but relief. Now he could simply go there. When he closed his eyes now, needles, syringes, ties, and fat, willing veins danced in his head.

  At noon on a Tuesday, returning dopesick to the Christodora, relieved to know that the Parentals were at work, he waited for the elevator in the empty lobby—Ardit had stepped away from the desk, where a game show murmured on his tiny portable TV. Before the elevator arrived, he heard a clambering down the stairs around the corner—­footsteps, but also dog steps, the rattle of a dog leash.

  “Shit!” It was the voice of Elysa, Millimom’s actress friend. In a moment, he heard her footsteps recede back up the stairwell. He peered around the corner to find Katsu, her new pit mix—Kenji, his childhood love, had died years before—double-tied to the stair railing, panting just aside Elysa’s wide-open pocketbook. Apparently she’d forgotten something and run back upstairs. He peered inside her bag, absently stroking the panting Katsu’s head for a moment, then plucked out Elysa’s wallet, extracted the wad of bills in the fold, dropped the wallet back in the bag, and ducked out of the Christodora just as the elevator doors were parting for him. Not until he was halfway across the park did he dare to thumb through the cash, which totaled $187. He’d intended to rummage around inside the apartment to pull together the bills and change for his next fix, but now he didn’t need to. In less than an hour, he was back in Jersey City, nodding—as was the pimply high-school kid and a few other randoms, all of it compliments of Mateo. He’d safely averted the worst of the dopesickness.

  When he looked at his phone seven hours later, he saw a voice mail from Jared-dad: “Do you know you were caught on camera?” went the message, in an impossibly flat tone of disgust. “You need to get home right away and tell us what exactly is going on. We are assuming you have a drug problem and now basically the whole building knows, too. You are in deep shit, Mateo.”

  There was also a text from Millimom: “Please please please come home.”

  He didn’t come home until the next day, protected from dopesickness with the rest of the stash he’d bought, tucked between his shoe and his sock, terrified they’d find it and take it away from him. Ardit glanced up at him as he shuffled in and looked away, disgusted, shaking his head.

  “You better get upstairs now,” Ardit said.

  Upstairs, he found them sitting at the kitchen table—they’d stayed home from work waiting for him to come back. His jig was up. At least he didn’t have to sneak around them anymore. He stood there, staring at them, fighting the urge to scratch himself or hug himself against the oncoming achiness, and they stared at him with a hollow, resigned look. They were sad, he could see, because their best-laid plans were blowing up in their faces.

  “Is it heroin, Mateo?” Jared-dad asked.

  He nodded. Millimom started to cry.

  “You,” Jared continued slowly, “have to go upstairs with us and apologize to Elysa, so she understands you have a drug addiction. Then you’re packing a bag and we’re getting on Metro-North with you and taking you to a rehab in Connecticut. We’ve already called. This is all part of the deal, and if you don’t like it, you can get your things right now and turn around and never set foot in this house again. We didn’t sign up for this.”

  “Why’d you sign up at all?” Mateo was surprised to hear himself shoot back through his achy malaise.

  Milly stood. “Mateo, sweetheart, please, just go along with us on this. You need help before it gets worse.”

  He capitulated to her—not him, but her. He went to the rehab. But a few months after that, it got worse anyway, culminating with the infamous Sculpture Incident of October 2011, which had gotten him kicked out of the apartment for real. That’s when Kyla stepped in and got him into that rehab in California, then to her place—and to the AA meeting that day with Carrie, track marks fading under his long-sleeved jersey. And the round-robin coming around to him. “I’m Mateo and I’m a addick.”

  “Hi, Mateo,” everybody said, singsongy.

  “I have seventy-nine days today,” he said. Everybody clapped and said things like “All right!”

  “Uh—” What should he say? “I guess I’m grateful for my sobriety.” Then—he didn’t know why—he kind of laughed a little. Like he was laughing at what he just said. It did sound mighty clichéd. “Uh, I have a lot of cravings. A lot of fantasizing.”

  Heads bobbed in accord around the room.

  “And a lot of—like, about the future. I wanna go back to New York. I’m an artist. I wanna finish school. L.A. freaks me out.”

  People laughed.

  “It’s too fuckin’ warm, man, this is fuckin’ January!” he said, egged on a bit by the laughter. “But I guess—some nice people are putting me up. And my parental figures in New York really can’t deal with me now anyways. So I guess I’m just trying to stay focused on today and not freak out over the future.” Always best to fall back on a twelve-step cliché if you’re stuck for your next line, he thought. So, voilà. “Thanks.”

  “Thanks, Mateo,” everyone chorused.

  Carrie was sitting across the room from him, three rows back in the concentric circles of chairs, so the round-robin never got to her. But when he finished speaking and was twisting his torso in his seat to stretch, he caught her eye and she smiled sweetly, as though to say, Nice job, and he smiled back.

  At the end of the meeting, when he was helping put away chairs, she came over and asked if he was going out to coffee with the others. At the IHOP, they sat together at the end of a long booth full of their fellow struggling derelicts, some crankily silent, some too boisterous, no one at ease in their skin.

  “I want a cigarette but I’m gonna wait till we leave instead of going outside now,” announced Carrie, apropos of nothing. She had something like twenty-two days clean—unless you counted chain-smoking, the last acceptable fix of the recovering junkie—and she was a mess, a ball of bad, shaky, nervous energy, constantly pulling at her lip and looking away. But fuck, she was cute.

  “You look a little like Jean Seberg,” Mateo told her.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Are you serious?” he asked. “You never saw Breathless?”

  “No. What’s that?”

  “It’s a Godard movie.”

  She shrugged at him. “I don’t know what that is, either.”

  “He was a filmmaker.” Okay, he thought, so a cutie, but not so well versed. Where had she said she was from originally? Arizona? That probably explained that.

  “Maybe you can show me the movie
someday,” she said. She was glancing at him sideways while she pretended to look at the vast breakfast options on the laminated menu.

  “That could be arranged,” he said in a coy kind of maybe-maybe voice.

  It’s not like H ever came up. It was more like, when they swapped numbers before everyone parted ways outside of IHOP, he just knew it wasn’t a good idea. He didn’t tell his sponsor about it, just like he hadn’t told his sponsor he’d been thinking more and more about Hector, missing their dream sessions, wondering if Hector was in Palm Springs, not two hours away. He didn’t tell Kyla and Christian. No wonder he felt so crappy that afternoon throwing all his shit in his bag, plucking those credit cards out of Kyla’s wallet, out of her bag, on the kitchen table, and slipping out of the house while he knew she was deep in her writing time. He took the cards almost as a kind of self-guarantee; from here on out, it’d be easier to go ahead and use than to turn back around, hand over the cards to Kyla, fess up to his aborted plans.

  His heart was pounding as he clomped his way down the winding streets out of the hills toward Sunset. On some level, he knew he was going back to square one, undoing absolutely anything he had achieved in the past eighty-six days—that whole expensive time he’d spent at that second, fancy rehab with the yoga and the organic food, the goodwill he’d built up with Kyla and Christian since he’d been out. And he knew the text he was about to send was wrong, that he was pulling someone else down with him. But he had no choice. The time had come. In his heart, he never really believed he’d go more than, say, ninety days without the stuff. That just wasn’t a viable way to live, and part of him pitied the AA people who truly believed it was. In fact, he liked the hard, pragmatic focus it took to sideline every other intervening thought and wend his way, deftly and efficiently, toward the prize. It was a bit like making art at its best—a clean, totalizing focus.

  “U feel like hanging out?” he texted Carrie while waiting for a bus on Sunset, where every stray glance from the folks around him—the elderly ladies in faded housedresses and the Honduran cleaning women in T-shirts and jeans—seemed to signal: We know what you’re about to do. But whoa, he was free! L.A. had never felt like this before, a wide-open playground. He could probably hook this up with Carrie, but even if he couldn’t, he knew he’d do it by some other means, probably within hours. There was the joy of that wild, blank canvas in front of him. Which reminded him . . . ATM? He knew he had only so much time to get resources before Kyla and Christian discovered the cards were absent and canceled them. He hit an ATM outside a convenience store, withdrew the maximum allowed sum of $400, then, still enjoying the hard, lean focus of liberation, trucked it with his bag a few more blocks until he came to another ATM and took out another max of $400.

  Right after that, he got Carrie’s text: her address, then “u coming now?”

  “u bet,” he texted back.

  “u r not far. take the bus south on Alvarado.”

  She gave him more detailed directions after that and he started walking. Eventually he got to Westlake, her nondescript neighborhood, found her pale yellow apartment complex with the scraggly palms outside, buzzed her unit until she let him in, then walked down a dim hallway with faded industrial carpeting and water stains on the ceiling.

  Carrie answered the door in a tank top and cutoff jean shorts, barefoot. “Heeey,” she said, her eyes widening at the sight of his huge duffel bag. “What’s up with the bag?”

  “Well,” he began, taking in her place: an ill-lit studio with a futon, a thirty-two-inch TV, a laptop and speakers, piles of clothes everywhere, and a poster of Debbie Harry circa 1979 on the wall over the futon. “I’m over it. I’m just over it. I’ve had enough.”

  She took a few paces back from him. “You’re going back to New York?”

  He hadn’t even thought that far ahead. “First I really just wanna get high,” he said. There, he’d said it. He shrugged and laughed sheepishly.

  Carrie put a hand to her mouth. “Oh, shit. Really?”

  “Couldn’t you kind of get that’s what I was talking about when I asked if you wanna hang out?”

  She put her arms around herself. “Well, I mean, I wasn’t really sure.” She continued hugging herself nervously. He knew she had about thirty days clean at that point, her most time ever. But here was where he had to have discipline, focus! Human feeling must be pierced through with laser precision if he was going to pull this off.

  “I would like to do this with you just once,” he said. He knew he had to work fast. He stepped toward her and took her face in his hands, massaging toward the back of her neck, down her bare shoulders. “We can both go back and start counting again after that.”

  “Oh God,” she said. She had her hands on his arms now but she wasn’t exactly pushing him away. “It’s been so hard getting to this point.”

  “I need a break from the effort,” he said.

  She made a tortured sound, digging her nails into his arms. “Mateo, you have to go,” she finally said.

  They stared at each other. He knew he was giving her the blank, lost, little-boy sheepdog look. How to play this? he wondered. Perhaps best to walk it back for a moment.

  So he did, literally. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’ll find my own. Sorry I came over. I shouldn’t have done that.”

  “I wish you’d just go to a meeting,” she said. “Do you want to go right now?” Carrie had a car, a crappy little 1994 Civic.

  He couldn’t tell her he felt it was too late for that—his bag was packed, the credit cards were stolen. “I’m just gonna go do my own thing,” he said, reopening the door to leave. He turned back, kissed her quickly on the forehead. “Take care of yourself.”

  He felt the loneliness he was leaving behind: her single, sad room; the total lack of connection to L.A. except for those early, tenuous friendships in meetings; the TV with a talk show on low volume. He was counting on it.

  And it worked. Carrie sighed. “Put your bag down, Mateo. We can drive over to a guy I know.”

  Ding, ding, ding. Now was the time to play it carefully. He turned. “You can just call him for me and I can go myself,” he said. “You don’t have to be part of this.”

  She’d turned to put on her flip-flops, grab her car keys and sunglasses. “Just shut up,” she said flatly, averting her eyes as she walked past him toward the door. And there he felt the moral split! Look what you’ve just done, he thought, you are the devil, basically. But he also thought: Mission accomplished. Now he just had to be steely and keep all ambivalence and feeling tamped down until the spike went in.

  Neither of them talked as she drove. On Sunset, he noticed a girl, semi-obscured in a doorway, nodding in short-shorts and a tank top, and he hoped that Carrie hadn’t seen her. Carrie drove west on Third Street into a pretty neighborhood on Windsor Square, pulled up in front of a peach-colored apartment building on a corner.

  “You didn’t call him first?” he asked her.

  “He’s always here,” she said.

  Carrie buzzed.

  “Yeah?” came a guy’s voice.

  “Hey, it’s Carrie!” she called breezily.

  The buzzer sounded, the door clicked open. The halls of the apartment smelled like some sick orangey cleanser. Mateo heard MGMT blaring on the other side of the door, which opened. The guy was a fucking hipster with graying temples; he looked like he could be a screenwriter. The place was midcentury-thrift trendy, a big photo of topless Bardot over the teak-frame couch.

  “Hey!” the guy said. He kissed Carrie and then, strangely, turned up the music so that everyone had to strain to talk over it. Oh, Mateo realized, he was afraid of clients wearing a wire. Carrie didn’t seem nervous. She just seemed sort of glazed and sad. Well, Mateo thought, too bad. The guy wanted them to hang out. Carrie looked at Mateo questioningly. Had they fucked before?

  “Nah,” Mateo said, “let’s just go b
ack and chill out.” He handed the guy $200 and asked for spikes, too.

  The guy looked at him anew, impressed. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  Then the guy shrugged, going off into the bedroom. Mateo sat down on the couch next to Carrie, saying nothing. He put a hand on her neck, massaged it. She looked at him and shook her head. Oh, shit. Her eyes were welling. Time to take action. He leaned over, kissed her gently on the lips.

  “We are going to have a very nice time,” he said softly, smiling.

  “I know,” she said, sounding more resigned than excited.

  The guy came back with a paper bag, which Mateo put in his jeans pocket. He thanked the hipster douchebag in his completely non-suspect, pretty neighborhood.

  “Don’t be a stranger, Carrie,” the hipster said as they were leaving. Carrie looked back at him and smiled weakly. They drove back to her place in silence. The TV was still on—she’d forgotten to turn it off.

  “I want to take a shower first,” Carrie said.

  “No, no, no, come here,” Mateo said, pulling her back, taking her in his arms. He couldn’t wait. His heart was throbbing right out of his chest and he was sweating all over, so he had to make this sexy if he wanted it to happen right away. “I like you like this,” he said. “I wanna smell you.”

  “Gross!” She laughed, squirming in his arms. He eased her down to the floor.

  “Hold on,” she said.

  She went to the kitchen and came back with stuff they needed: the spoon, the lighter, paper towels, and alcohol. They sat down on the floor together. Mateo already felt high. He’d done it; he was sitting here with everything he needed right in front of him. His heart was in his throat, a swarm of butterflies were dancing in his stomach, his arms and legs were already delicately twitching with what he’d learned in rehab was called “euphoric recall.” He pulled off his belt and took off his shirt and looked at the left inner elbow where the dim quarter-inch track mark he’d had was fading, then tied his belt loosely around his arm. Carrie was setting things up for him resignedly. He dared to look at her. She was slowly shaking her head.