The Weight of Air

by David Poses

  Sandra Jonas Publishing

  PO Box 20892

  Boulder, CO 80308

  sandrajonaspublishing.com

  Copyright © 2021 by David Poses

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used in any form whatsoever without the written permission of the publisher, except for brief quotations included in critical articles and reviews.

  Book and cover design by Sandra Jonas

  Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Poses, David, author.

  Title: The Weight of Air: A Story of the Lies about Addiction and the Truth about Recovery / David Poses.

  Description: Boulder, CO : Sandra Jonas Publishing, 2021. |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021933178 | ISBN 9781954861992 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781954861978 (paperback) | ISBN 9781954861923 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Poses, David. | Depressed persons—Biography. | Recovering addicts—Biography. | LCGFT: Autobiographies. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Social Activists.

  Classification: LCC HV5805 .P6747 | DDC 362.293092 — dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2021933178

  v2.1

  This is for you

  contents

  cover

  title page

  copyright

  author’s note

  part one: 1995

  one

  two

  three

  four

  five

  six

  seven

  eight

  nine

  ten

  eleven

  twelve

  thirteen

  fourteen

  fifteen

  part two: 1996

  sixteen

  seventeen

  eighteen

  nineteen

  twenty

  twenty-one

  twenty-two

  twenty-three

  twenty-four

  part three: 1999

  twenty-five

  twenty-six

  twenty-seven

  twenty-eight

  twenty-nine

  thirty

  thirty-one

  part four: 2000

  thirty-two

  thirty-three

  thirty-four

  thirty-five

  thirty-six

  thirty-seven

  thirty-eight

  thirty-nine

  epilogue

  acknowledgments

  playlist

  about the author

  author's note

  I recreated the scenes and dialogue in this book from memory and journal entries. Some of the names and details were changed by request. I’m not a doctor, and the information presented should not be used for diagnosis or treatment or as a substitute for professional care. Please accept my apologies for the stigmatizing language. I don’t condone the use of such offensive words and phrases, but it would have been dishonest to exclude them.

  part one

  1995

  one

  Rob was right. My plan is a fucking disaster.

  It made perfect sense yesterday. I’d kick here at Mom’s house while she was in Florida. No distractions. No one around. Rob would have my car so I couldn’t leave. This would be different, not like the other times I tried. And in just a few days, the whole mess would be behind me.

  But that was before the last hit of heroin raced out of every pore, before the puking, before my legs started twitching—before all the bones in my body felt like they were disintegrating.

  And I know it’ll only get worse.

  Rob warned me. “When you’re shooting this much dope,” he said between urgent puffs on a crack pipe, “you don’t just decide to quit. I’ll take you to the methadone clinic. Or you can do a slow taper. Or get on buprenorphine.”

  No, I told him. I needed to do it my way.

  Now all I want is relief.

  The volume on the stereo is cranked. Johnny Rotten screams about blood, and bile and bodies. I wipe vomit off my face with one of Mom’s soft fancy towels and stumble out of the bathroom and down the hall, past dozens of photographs in uniform frameless frames. Most are of me and my brother, Daniel. Our mother is in some. Our father is in none. I stop at a picture taken at a beach when I was eleven and Daniel was eight. He’s smiling maniacally. I look blank, my lips pressed into a thin line.

  Before he left, Rob put six blue Klonopin on the kitchen counter. “When you can’t stand it another second, take one,” he said.

  I toss all six into my mouth and swallow. One comes up in a puddle of yellow and brown phlegm. It stays down when I chase it with ginger ale.

  I wait. Nothing happens. How long before I feel something?

  Outside, snow is falling. Seconds take hours to pass. Doubled over, one arm wrapped around my stomach, I call the apartment Rob and I have shared since December. The phone rings and rings and rings. I try his beeper. “We’re sorry. This number is no longer in service.”

  I slide down to the floor and light a cigarette. Squinting and swatting at tendrils of smoke, I remember the empty bags Rob threw in the trash after we shot up. On a heap of paper towels and coffee grinds, I spot two glassine envelopes with archaic Hotstepper stamps—the closest you’ll get to quality assurance on a ten-dollar bag of heroin.

  Grabbing a steak knife, I split the bags and use the dull edge to scrape the creases. With the flat end of a syringe, I mix the powder and water in a spoon, and then I suck the concoction into the chamber. No lighter. No cooking. No cotton. My stomach clenches with anticipation.

  I tighten a belt around my upper arm and hold it in my teeth and make a fist. When the vein pops, I stab it with the needle and release the medicine into my bloodstream. Tension disappears from my body in less than a second. My insides begin to warm. My legs stop twitching. I can breathe again—for the moment.

  The countdown to withdrawal resets. I’ll try again when this wears off. I can do this. For fuck’s sakes, if I can’t get through the day without a tiny speck of powder, I don’t deserve to live. Next month, I’ll be nineteen or I’ll be nothing.

  I turn off the stereo and collapse on the couch. On TV, a kid hits a baseball over a fence in a Little League game, and his proud father charges onto the field. Cut to the inside of a McDonald’s, where he tousles his son’s hair and they enjoy a celebratory Happy Meal together.

  I close my eyes.

  Is this a dream? My father never randomly shows up here. I hear him say Mom’s name. He speaks with the authority of a switchblade.

  “Robin, wake up and smell the coffee,” his voice booms from the kitchen. “Your son’s a dope fiend.”

  I’m lying on my stomach on the couch. Everything hurts. When I sit up, I start to cough uncontrollably. It’s dark outside. The clock on the VCR says 6:05—a.m. or p.m.?

  A guy I’ve never seen before lumbers into the living room. His doughy paunch jiggles behind a New York Mets jersey. Number sixteen. “Bob,” he calls over his shoulder, “the dope fiend is up.”

  My father pokes his head into the room, the cordless phone cradled in his neck, and gives me a long, narrow-eyed once-over. His hair is more salt and less pepper than it was a year ago, the last time we saw and spoke to each other.

  “Bob, waddaya want me to do?”

  “I don’t know, Howie. Maybe sit on him so he doesn’t do something stupid again? He’s too whacked out to know we’re trying to help him.”

  Howie grabs my arm and the back of my head and forces me to the floor. “This is tough love, brother,” he says.

  The carpet scrapes against my cheek like sandpaper. I squirm and wriggle under his weight, and he shifts forward, planting his giant ass into the base of my spine. I laugh n
ervously.

  “Something funny, dope fiend?”

  “Your breath smells like Doritos and coffee.”

  “And you look like a friggin’ clown with that orange hair.”

  “I think I’m gonna puke.”

  “You’re out of your gourd if you think I’m falling for that again.”

  I cough up bile, and my nose starts to bleed. Howie yanks me to my feet and points to the floor. “I’m sure your mom wants to come home to this friggin’ mess.”

  A trail of blood stretches from the kitchen to the front door, where a broken glass jar sits next to a pile of loose change.

  “How much dope did you think you’d score with that?”

  What happened last night?

  Dad joins us, squeezing the bridge of his nose as if he has a headache.

  “I take it the ex-wife wasn’t too thrilled?”

  “She can’t help it,” Dad says. “It’s hard not to sound crazy when you’re crazy.”

  I’m not a violent person, but I want to punch him in the face.

  My self-proclaimed saviors carry me out of the house in a T-shirt and boxers and load me into the back of Dad’s BMW like a cheap rug. He squeals out of the driveway. The Pointer Sisters’ “Neutron Dance” comes on the stereo, and he pumps up the volume. Bobbing his head, he sings along with made-up lyrics involving rutabagas and watermelons.

  Splayed across the back seat, I curl into the fetal position and watch the streetlights blur by. “Where are we going?” I manage to yell above the music.

  “Don’t worry about it, dope fiend.”

  It’s still dark outside when we careen into the emergency entrance at United Hospital in Port Chester. The clock on the dash says 7:45. It must be p.m.

  A nurse hustles me into a small triage area and closes the curtain. She opens a sealed package of surgical scissors, cuts off my clothes without explanation, and helps me into a gown—the kind that leaves little to the imagination in the rear.

  Howie slips in. “Your old man’ll catch up once he’s dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s.”

  “Are you allergic to any medications?” the nurse asks.

  “Yeah,” Howie says. “Dope.”

  The nurse stabs my thigh with a shot of Clonidine and drops the needle into a red biohazard container. She grabs a wheelchair and pats the seat.

  “His legs ain’t broke,” Howie says.

  “Sorry,” the nurse says, unapologetically. “Hospital policy.”

  She wheels me down a wide yellow corridor lined with posters of iconic Westchester County locations. I’ve gotten high at most of them over the past three years. The beach at Rye Playland. Saxon Woods Park in Mamaroneck. Downtown Tarrytown, facing the Hudson River. I used to stop at an abandoned warehouse before school and shoot up in my car.

  I got decent grades. I was the top-seeded player on my high school tennis team. And I was on heroin.

  Struggling to keep up, Howie gasps about kicking in a friggin’ jail cell around twenty hard motherfuckers. “This is a picnic,” he says, “kicking in a friggin’ hospital.”

  My last visit to a hospital was two years ago, when Mom’s cancer came back. I remember her first battle better. Dad took Daniel and me to see her after surgery. I thought it was going to fix her, but she looked frail, and her voice was groggy and barely audible.

  When we left her room, I asked Dad if Mom was going to die. He finally answered in the elevator. “Probably,” he said, as if it were an overcast day and I’d asked if it might rain. I put on a brave face as we walked to the car in silence. Nobody was in the pay booth at the parking lot, and Dad started to drive around the gate. But then he realized he couldn’t do it without scratching his new Jaguar and let loose a string of f-bombs.

  At the end of the corridor, a burly security guard uses his body as a shield while punching numbers into a keypad. A wide door opens in stop-start motion. The nurse pushes me into a room cut in half by a giant turquoise shower curtain.

  Two TVs are mounted to the wall, one opposite each bed. My roommate moans as he watches The Price Is Right on mute.

  The nurse hangs bags of clear liquids on a pole and attaches a narrow tube that ends in a wide needle. After swabbing the inside of my elbow with rubbing alcohol, she sticks in the IV with a sympathetic smile.

  “Get comfy,” she says. “You’ll be here a few days unless other plans were—”

  Dad arrives out of breath. “Yep,” he says, hunched over, his hands on his thighs. He glances at Howie. “Joey’s on it.”

  Who the fuck is Joey?

  I stare up at the foamy white tiles in the ceiling covered with Rorschach-pattern water stains. One resembles the outline of Florida, minus the panhandle. Another could be a unicorn. I ask if anyone sees the unicorn in the ceiling. Silence.

  My mom would see the unicorn if she were here. She’d find other things too. One of her biggest complaints about my father over the years, apart from his lack of a conscience, is his inability to see the face in the man in the moon.

  “Get some rest, sweet boy,” Dad says, laying the back of his hand on my forehead. “This would have been much worse if you hadn’t called.”

  two

  It’s 5 a.m. Bunny rabbits scamper across the TV screen, going “bok bok b’kok” like chickens and pooping chocolate eggs. An announcer with an aristocratic British accent says, “Easter is coming. Load up on Cadbury Crème Eggs.”

  I could really use some chocolate right now to coat the acid in my gut and distract me from the sledgehammer pounding every inch of my body. I hit the button on the wall next to my bed. A nurse with kind eyes appears. I swing my legs over the edge of the bed and tell her I want to go home.

  “Uh, hold on a sec,” she says, backing into the hall. I watch her shadow’s arms flail and somebody else’s shadow run to her. They whisper.

  A doctor in a crisp white lab coat enters and lectures me about the high rate of relapse among “junkies” who fail to complete a medically supervised detox and drug treatment and blah blah blah. I yank out the IV and take a few steps.

  The doctor raises his hands. “Whoa there, chief.”

  The nurse gets between us. In a singsong voice, she says, “The kitchen is clo-sed but I might know some-one who can pull some strings and get you some Jell-O . . .”

  I stumble into the hallway and look for the exit.

  The doctor follows, running his hand along the rail on the wall, his wedding ring clanging against the steel as he asks if I understand the consequences of my decision. I nod. In the lobby, he asks the receptionist for an AMA form. He thwaps it against the wall and clicks a pen.

  “AMA stands for ‘against medical advice,’” he says.

  I sign without reading and go outside into the freezing cold, my bare ass exposed.

  Shivering by the entrance, I remember the first time I bucked medical advice. In the seventh grade, after my orthodontist broke repeated promises to remove my braces next time, I took matters into my own hands—literally. It was a bitch to pry those fuckers off with my fingers, without a mirror, in fifth-period study hall. Not completely thorough, I made enough progress for Mom to notice. The next morning, as Dr. Berman lectured me about the permanent damage I’d caused to my enamel, he removed the remaining metal from my teeth.

  The sun cracks its yolk on the horizon. I go back inside and call my father—collect—from a pay phone.

  No blood in the foyer or on the carpet. No broken glass or loose change. I still don’t remember what happened and don’t want to ask. I muster a halfhearted thank-you.

  “The people you really need to thank are Howie and Joey,” Dad says. “You wouldn’t be going to Hazelden if Joey hadn’t made a few calls on your behalf.”

  He launches into a monologue about Joey’s “miraculous recovery from dope fienddom” twenty years ago. With enough context, I realize Hazelden is a rehab and Joey is my aunt Jo, a hotshot lawyer who works for Sunbeam, the company that makes blenders and all kinds of other things.
>
  The front door opens. I hear Mom crying, and my heart sinks. Of course she came home early. Her face looks unfamiliar and old and puffy, no makeup, giant purple bags under her eyes, and her short brown hair, always styled to perfection, is a staticky bird’s nest.

  I can taste her tears as she grips me in a tight hug. She lets go and hesitates before taking a seat on the couch, two cushions from Dad. I drop to the floor and sit across from my parents, hugging my knees, wishing I could disappear, trying to remember the last time they were together in the same room.

  Choked up, Mom leans forward. “Why?”

  Dad clasps his hands behind his head and closes his eyes.

  I take a deep breath, swallow hard, and choose my words carefully, but not necessarily honestly. “Rob had some heroin. I asked to try it.”

  “When, David?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe six months ago.”

  Mom buries her head in her hands and sobs.

  Dad gets up and roars. “You never held the boys accountable for anything, Robin. You’ve got Daniel at that boarding school because he got kicked out of every school around here, and David’s in the city every night at Limelight and . . . How did you not know he was stoned out of his mind on drugs?”

  My skin tightens, as if it’s stuck to my bones. I want to say, “She didn’t know I was stoned out of my mind because I wasn’t. Heroin makes me feel normal.” Instead I ask, “Do I have to go to rehab? This whole thing happened because I decided to quit—”

  “Son, you and your mother are going to do what you’re going to do—because that’s what you’ve always done.”

  “That’s not fair,” Mom says.

  “Robin, you want to bury your son? He’ll be dead in a week if he doesn’t go.”

  Mom starts to cry again. I agree to go to rehab.

  “Please,” she says, “promise me you’ll never do . . . I can’t even say it . . . that shit . . . again.”

  I promise. And I want so badly to mean it.

  three

  It’s almost noon when the plane descends from a clear blue sky into Minneapolis. The wheels touch down and the passengers applaud as if the pilot did us a huge favor by not crashing.