This River

by James Brown

  All during this same period of time, I have yet to see my children. The court date has been postponed again and again, and it’s been pulling me down, the waiting; it’s been growing, the anger inside me, the sadness and frustration. Sometimes late at night, on my way home from the university, I take a detour and park on the street in front of my old house. The windows are usually dark except for a light in the kitchen, and I wonder if my wife is still awake or if the light has been left on for safety’s sake. I imagine my boys sound asleep in bed. I imagine kissing them each good night, as I often did, and cuddling the youngest to my chest before placing him in the crib. Leaving my children is intensely, horribly difficult, and for many nights, as my fiancée sleeps quietly beside me, I lay awake wondering how I can justify the pain I’ve caused my family in the pursuit of alleviating my own.

  By the end of the quarter, Yukio has earned a B. I file a Change of Grade form that the dean and chair have to sign, which they do willingly and quickly, and in June he’s awarded the Bachelor of Arts in English with a concentration in Creative Writing. Now it’s the day after graduation ceremonies, and as I’m gathering my things to leave for the summer Yukio shows up at my office. Nothing has been resolved in my personal life, and I’m troubled. I’m emotionally exhausted and he can sense it.

  “Are you okay, Professor Brown?”

  “I’m fine,” I say.

  “You don’t look fine,” he says.

  I do a quick check around the office to make sure I’ve locked the window, turned off the computer and printer. I close my briefcase. I shut off the light.

  “I was just on my way out,” I say. “You want to walk and talk.”

  I lock the door behind me and we head down the hall, down the stairs, and out of the building. It’s a smoggy day. It’s a hot day in the triple digits, and if the skies were clear you’d see the San Bernardino Mountains rising from the foothills at the base of the campus. Now, with the haze so thick, you wouldn’t even know the mountains were there. In my ears I suddenly feel the rapid beat of my heart, and then it’s as if a flood gate has opened and I’m talking, telling him about my situation. The divorce. My wife. The loss of my boys and how powerless I feel. Frustration builds and turns to depression. Depression becomes despair, and when what little hope might remain finally dies, a dangerous fire ignites. I don’t know if I’m making any sense. Everything seems told out of sequence, and I try to back up, explain that my fitness as a father is in question. That it’s because I drink too much. That maybe my head isn’t screwed on tight. I tell him that after a series of postponements I’ve finally been assured by the court that there will be no further delays. Next week I’ll know one way or the other if I’ve lost my visitation rights. There is talk of having a neutral third party present whenever I see my sons. These visits will be reduced to a matter of hours once or twice a month.

  “Maybe you should write a story about it. But don’t show it to anyone,” he says. “Just write it and put it away and maybe you can make something good out of it later. It might help.”

  We reach the parking lot, and it’s mostly empty, because school is out for the summer. Beside my car is an old Pontiac Firebird, its black paint faded, squatting on its axles from the weight inside. Through the back window you can see all sorts of personal belongings piled up against the glass.

  Yukio hands me a set of keys.

  “I leave for Japan tomorrow,” he says. “Take what you want and give the rest to the Goodwill. You can sell the car. It’s not worth much but it runs. The papers are in the glove compartment. I’ve signed them, and I have a bike too. A nice bike for one of your sons. It’s locked to the railing outside the library. The key’s on the ring.” He pauses. “If it wasn’t for you,” he tells me, “I wouldn’t have graduated. You’ll be okay, Professor Brown. I know you’ll be okay.”

  I really don’t want his car.

  I really don’t want all the stuff inside of it, either. But it wouldn’t be right to say so.

  The pulsing in my ears has passed as suddenly as it came over me. We shake hands. We wish each other well, and I’ll never know if what he said to me about writing a story signaled a greater understanding of his own. But I would like to believe so. I would like to believe as I did then, and as I do now, that he never would’ve followed through on his threats. Of course I could be wrong. I could be very wrong. Pushed to the brink, denied both voice and dignity, he could’ve well imploded. To a degree I would understand it, and to a lesser extent even sympathize. I like to think I’m different but I am not. I could easily find myself alongside Yukio, enraged and scared and full of malice, doing more than trading stories about the potential to violence in us all.

  “Be careful,” I say. “Take care of yourself.”

  “You be careful too, Professor Brown.”

  But I think we both know, as we turn and go our separate ways, that we are never truly safe, least of all from ourselves.

  INSTRUCTIONS ON THE USE OF HEROIN

  I park behind the broken-down Mercury Marquis in the driveway of my drug dealer’s house. Ironically he is also my former A.A. sponsor. It’s a warm summer night, and as I leave my car a couple of big mangy dogs appear from out of the darkness and begin barking. If I didn’t know them I’d be scared, but I do know them because I’ve been here before, too many times, and they’re not biters. The stairs leading to the front door are falling apart, one is missing altogether, and I step over it. The dogs are behind me all the way, sniffing at my legs.

  This is not in the ghetto.

  This is not the mean streets of San Bernardino, one of the most violent, drug-ridden cities in the nation. This is in the neighboring mountains well above the fray. I live safely removed from the drive-bys, the gangs, and their turf wars. In my community, you can still walk the streets at night. In my community, lakeside homes sell for millions, but even here, among the rich and middle class, there is a darker, subterranean life, and as a user of narcotics I have a special knack, a real sixth sense, for rooting it out wherever I go.

  As I reach the landing at the end of the stairs, two powerful sensor lights flash on. I wince at the brightness. Then I press the button on the intercom and look up at the fake birdhouse mounted in the corner of the sun deck above me. Inside it is a camera, and I want my dealer to see me, so he doesn’t panic and stick his 9mm in my face when I come to the door. He’s done it before. There’s static on the intercom, then the scratchy sound of his voice.

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s me,” I say. “Jim.”

  “Hang on.”

  On the other side of the door are three iron bars, one at the top, one in the middle, and the third near the bottom. There’s also a deadbolt, a chain latch, and the regular lock. Inside I hear the clanking of the bars being removed from their steel brackets, the slam of the deadbolt, the turning of the knob, and finally the door opens a crack. The chain is still latched. He peers out at me.

  “You alone?”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  The door closes. A second later it opens again and he lets me in, along with his mangy dogs. Green garbage bags full of dirty clothes, and computer monitors, computer casings, and shells are scattered all over this downstairs area of the house. It smells, too, like urine and shit, because he sometimes forgets to let the dogs out. He’s wearing a ratty tank top, but what I notice most at this moment are the syringes hanging from his shoulders, one on each side, the needles sunk into the middle head of the deltoid muscle. On the left, it’s loaded with heroin. On the right, it’s cocaine. I can tell the difference because one syringe contains a darkcolored fluid while the other, the coke, is a milky white.

  If he needs a bump up, he depresses the plunger on the milky-white side. If he needs a bump down, something to even him out, to take the edge off the coke, it’s the dark side. The idea is to find the perfect balance, but for now he’s on the upside, spun on the coke.

  To protect his privacy, if only in memory, because he is dead as I mak
e record of this story many years after the fact, I’ll give him another name, something common—Eddie. In addition to being a dealer he is also a friend. We met at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, and for nearly ten months, before we both relapsed, he’d been my sponsor, taking me through the Big Book several hours every week, page by page. He isn’t looking so good lately, little more than skin and bone. We shake hands and I follow him upstairs to the living room.

  Eddie gets right down to business.

  “What do you want?”

  “What do you have?”

  “Black,” he says. “Crack. Coke. Crystal. Weed. I got Dilaudid. I got methadone too,” he says, “Valium, Vicodin, and Oxycontin.”

  Dilaudid is like pharmaceutical-grade heroin, some junkies think it’s even better, and most people already know about Valium, Vicodin, and Oxycontin. Eddie suffers from a serious back injury, and after years of unsuccessful operations, his doctors now more or less prescribe whatever he wants in the line of opioid painkillers. Combine these with his black market dope and you have a walking, talking poster boy for the travails of addiction.

  “Some black,” I say.

  “Any weed?”

  In a room upstairs, Eddie has a farm of marijuana thriving under dozens of grow lights, and he’s always trying to push some off on me. But I’m scared of weed. It makes me paranoid. It makes me think, and thinking often depresses me, and depression isn’t exactly what I look for in the pursuit of getting fucked up. The same goes for psychedelics. I swore them off at the age of seventeen after a bad trip.

  “You know I hate that shit.”

  He laughs.

  “Just asking.”

  “All I want is black.”

  “No coke either.”

  “Not tonight.”

  “How much you want?”

  “A gram,” I say.

  At that, he disappears into another part of the house to retrieve the dope from its hiding spot, his gram scale, and the various other accoutrements of hard-core narcotic use. I sit down on the couch. An old episode of Gilligan’s Island plays on the TV. The Skipper is chasing Gilligan in circles around a coconut tree, and I watch them, trying to take my mind off the waiting. Soon Eddie returns.

  Clearing a spot on the coffee table, which is a mess of empty beer cans and bottles and ashtrays full of butts, he sets up his scale.

  “This is good stuff,” he says.

  This stuff is Mexican Black, most commonly referred to as tar. In its uncooked form, it resembles a lump of brown dirt, but it turns black, like tar, when you heat it up.

  From his front pocket Eddie takes out a knife. From his back pocket he removes a plastic baggie and a couple of packaged syringes, small ones, the kind diabetics use. Then he sits down on the couch beside me. I lean forward as he dips the tip of the knife into the baggie, scoops out a chunk of heroin about the size of a dime, and slips it onto the scale. While he weighs it, he glances up at me.

  “You in the market for an AK?” he says. “I got a friend who’s looking to unload an M-16, fully automatic. He has an Uzi, too, with the Israeli Army stamp on the side. A thousand bucks. And hand grenades, they go for eighty a piece or seventy by the dozen.”

  I have to think about it. A part of me would like to own an assault rifle or a little Uzi. The other part warns me off. I have no idea where I could even go to fire one. These aren’t the kind of weapons you take to your local shooting range. The grenades, they plain scare me.

  “It’s tempting,” I say. “But I’ll pass.”

  I stand up and open my wallet and drop two twenties on the table. Then I go to the kitchen and come back with a glass of water and a spoon. By now Eddie has weighed out my purchase, and from it, before he wraps it up, I pinch off a small chunk. He shakes his head. “You can always put more in,” he says, “but you can’t take it out. I’d use about half that first and see how it hits you. This batch is stronger than the last.” Of course I take his word for it. Eddie has been slamming dope off and on now for over thirty years, and until the last time he shot up, a week after he was released from prison on a possession for distribution charge, the fix that killed him, he’d never before o.d.’d. It’s a ritual, from weighing the junk to parceling it out and cooking it, and this process heightens the urgency of the act, from the anticipation of the rush to its delivery, the climax of finally shooting up. The procedure is simple: You place a small lump of junk into the spoon along with a piece of cotton, if you have any handy, or just a bit torn from a cigarette filter. Then you add a little water to it. Next you heat it up with a lighter, holding the flame under the spoon. When it begins to bubble and liquefy, you insert the needle into the cotton or the bit of cigarette filter and draw it out into the syringe by slowly pulling back on the plunger. In this way you eliminate many of the impurities and adulterants that might otherwise clog the needle. And for obvious reasons you must always, without exception, make absolutely sure that the syringe comes directly from its sealed package. You must see it done before your very eyes. You must never take anyone’s word.

  I’m in the process of heating up the heroin when Eddie’s girlfriend stumbles out of the bedroom in her flannel pajamas and fuzzy pink slippers. She’s barely eighteen, and with her mother’s permission, as horrific as that may seem since Eddie is my age at forty and a known dope addict, they’ve been living together for the last six months. That her mother is also a junkie should help to explain, though by no means justify, her reckless neglect.

  I’ll call her Crystal, after the drug crystal meth, and she’s just woken up, probably having slept through the entire day. Her timing in joining us is as usual uncanny. Like me, she has a sixth sense for when dope is near, and Eddie and I know to keep a close eye on her. Things like rings and watches, and especially drugs, often mysteriously disappear in her presence. It’s hard to blame her since she couldn’t possibly hold down a job in her condition, let alone attend school. She flops down on the couch with us. Her hair is bleached platinum blond, like Eddie’s ex-wife, and she’s bone-thin from too much heroin, speed, and coke. In the bend of one arm is the swell of a small abscess. Generally they’re caused from injecting in or near the same site too often, but sometimes bad junk alone can do it.

  “How you doing?” she asks.

  “Fine,” I say.

  “I haven’t seen you around in a while.”

  “Been busy,” I say.

  Crystal sometimes talks of becoming a cosmetologist. Eddie sometimes talks of opening his own computer repair shop. For now, however, I’m the only one in the room who has a real job, so I have to be careful about how often I get high. And I’m not implying I think of myself as any better than Eddie and Crystal, because I don’t. It’s just that I have a family. It’s just that I’ve been strung out before, and it’s cost me dearly. I believe, like all those who initially start and stop before becoming full-blown addicts, that I’m the exception—that I can use a little here and there for fun, just to relax, without it ever becoming a problem. I do and do not know that I’m lying to myself.

  The heroin is bubbling now, turning black, absorbing into the water. Carefully I set the spoon down on the coffee table, unwrap the syringe, and extract the dark liquid into it. Because it’s easy to miss the vein or go right through it, because it can make for a bloody mess, even causing the collapse of that vein, including those in the arms, neck, legs, between fingers and toes, I stick it in the middle deltoid of my shoulder. It feels like a mosquito bite. The needle is so thin you hardly notice it piercing your skin, and over the years I’ve come to like it, the sting, knowing the promise of euphoria is right at the other end.

  Where the high from an intravenous injection is almost instantaneous, the intramuscular shot takes fifteen, maybe twenty seconds to hit and it doesn’t come over you quite as powerfully. In this narrow span of time, Crystal reaches across me for the other chunk of heroin I left on the coffee table.

  “You mind?” she says.

  “Help yourself,” I say.r />
  She looks to Eddie for approval.

  “Baby,” he says, “you really need to slow down.”

  “And you don’t?”

  I feel it first in the body, a warming from deep inside, filling my chest, then spreading out into my legs and arms. It comes in waves, this sweeping warmth, and as it seeps into the mind all my worries, all my problems and concerns, immediately disappear. Heroin is the most seductive of the narcotics, bringing calm where there is anguish, ease where there is discomfort, and pain, physical or mental, gives way to peace and serenity. The heart slows. Breathing becomes shallow. The mind, emptied of life’s clutter, falls into a state of quiet. I feel it pulling me deeper, pulling me under, as if I’m collapsing into myself. In a minute, when the rush levels off, I’m drifting somewhere between wakefulness and dream.

  This is the destination.

  This is where the outside world ceases to exist and I am as free of it as the dead.

  Crystal has found a vein between her toes, though it’s taken her a few sticks, and there’s blood running down both sides of her ankle. As the rush hits her, as she falls back onto the couch, Eddie hurries to the kitchen and returns with a roll of paper towels and starts cleaning her up. And he does it tenderly. Like a lover. Like a father. I wonder if it’s really about her having nowhere else to go. I wonder if it’s because she has no real family. I was told her stepfather repeatedly molested her since the age of nine.

  For a while, we all just ride the high. Although I’m stoned, I’m still capable enough of understanding what’s going on around me. I’m still capable enough of seeing and hearing clearly, and I watch Crystal sit up. I watch her, as if in slow motion, reach for the pack of Marlboros on the coffee table, shake one out and place it between her lips. Before she can light it, her chin drops to her chest, and then, as if she were about to fall asleep, she jerks awake. This is called The Nods. Remarkably, the unlit cigarette hasn’t slipped from her mouth.