Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man

by Bill Clegg

  Later, the taxi driver and I sit in his cab behind a 7-Eleven somewhere in Newark. He’s anxious about being seen in the hotel because he picks people up and drops them off there every day. I pack his hit—small because there is precious little left—and as he lights up, I tell him how horny I get when I smoke. He nods in agreement as he exhales, and soon zippers come down—mine first, then his. I take a hit and he holds himself and talks about his wife, how she blows him but never wants to fuck. I inhale so hard that I burn my forefinger and thumb. I should be over the Atlantic right now, I think, but instead I’m behind a 7-Eleven, in the shadow of a Newark, New Jersey, overpass. What I want is the blurry oblivion of body-crashing sex, and instead I get a gloomy jerk-off session without enough drugs to get either of us high. As the bag empties, I start to feel shaky and it occurs to me that I’ve gone nearly a week without sleep. It’s ten thirty p.m. and my flight tomorrow evening isn’t until eight. I ask the taxi driver if he knows where to score more and of course he doesn’t. I hide one last rock in the small front pocket of my jeans so there will be something when I get to the hotel room. I start thinking about whether I should go back to the city—to Mark’s, or to a hotel somewhere in Manhattan where I can call Happy. But the city seems time zones away. And if I go there, I know there will be no turning back, no chance of making it to Berlin.

  The taxi driver drops me off at the Marriott, and I call Happy the second I get to the room. After much haggling, he agrees to drive out to the hotel, but only if I will spend at least $800 to make it worthwhile. I say no problem.

  It is just after eleven when Happy and I speak. At eleven fifty he calls me from the parking lot to say he’s there. I can’t remember his ever delivering this quickly in Manhattan. I leave the room, take the elevator down to get cash from the ATM in the empty lobby, walk as slowly and calmly as I can, past the check-in desk and out into the parking lot, where his red minivan idles. My heart slams in my chest and my throat is so thick with fear I can barely speak as I hop into the front seat. Happy, as usual, is wearing his white sweatpants and plain black hooded sweatshirt. The only thing missing are the large earphones that usually ring his neck. He’s Dominican, in his early thirties, and we never say much to each other beyond amounts, addresses, and number of stems. He is always calm, and even though he’s driven all the way out to an airport hotel from Manhattan, tonight he’s no different. His movements are slow and patient as he counts out the sixteen bags, and he asks no questions as he hands me two clean stems. I shove it all in my front two pockets, thank him for coming out so fast, and head back to the hotel.

  If anyone had stopped to watch me go to the cash machine and withdraw stacks of bills, several times because of the $200 transaction limit, then head out to an idling van with tinted windows, and return minutes later with bulging pockets, it wouldn’t take much imagination to understand what had just transpired. As obvious and sloppy as I know the whole operation is, I know that once I get back to the room and take a big hit off one of the crystal-clear new stems, everything will be okay. That all the grim and alarming truths barking loudly around me will vanish in a blast of smoke.

  And so they do. It’s one o’clock and I have a spectacular pile of crack in the little ashtray on the nightstand. This is the most I have ever had on my own, and I know I will smoke every last bit of it. I wonder if somewhere in that pile is the crumb that will bring on a heart attack or stroke or seizure. The cardiac event that will deliver all this to an abrupt and welcome halt. My chest pounds, my fingers are singed, I fill my lungs with smoke.

  Bringing Down the House

  He’s six. Diminishing the value of the house. That’s what he’s being told. Bringing it down with piss-splattered heating vents in the bathroom coated with rust and stink. Making it more difficult to sell by scrubbing the pattern off the wallpaper next to the toilet each time he sprays there and tries to clean it up.

  They are in the green Volkswagen, and it’s not the first time his father has told him these things. That his piss is costing the family thousands of dollars is a fact as old as memory. He is quiet, as always when his problem comes up. His father talks in sharp, lean bursts that usually end with C’mon, Willie. Just get it together, or Jesus, kid, fix it. And then long stretches of silence. The only sounds in the car are the low hum of 1010 WINS on the radio and the click of his father’s pipe against his teeth.

  They are on a highway heading home from Boston. They drive uncomfortably fast until the traffic congeals and the swearing and the steering wheel pounding starts. As his father turns the radio down and adjusts the heating vents, he imagines him before the great panel of lights and gadgets in the cockpits of the planes he flies. The ones filled with passengers who trust him to take them across the ocean, to London and Paris. There are times—like this—when he can’t imagine anything his father cannot do.

  The traffic gets worse and his father grumbles at the cars in front of him. The boy stays quiet. He’s relieved that the attention has shifted away from him, from the reason they are in a car together today. They have gone to see a doctor—the one the Boston Red Sox use, his father said—to find out what exactly is wrong with him.

  What precisely goes on at this doctor’s office, he will forget. Maybe he remembered in the car, ran it over in his head as they rode home, or maybe it had already slipped away. In any case, he will spend years trying to remember, but the only part that ever comes back will be the car ride itself. He’ll remember the old lines about wrecking the house and the strange, nearly sexual air of the day—so much talk about penises and pissing. Something clandestine and shameful about the whole trip, which had begun with his mother’s pinched announcement at breakfast that he and his father would be going to Boston to visit a doctor. He’ll remember how worried she looked and how far away. He’ll remember wishing the car would rattle at high speed right off the road and go up in a blaze. He will persist with that kind of wish for years—in school buses, planes, vans, trains. He’ll also remember—and this most vividly—a prediction his father makes. That very soon his friends—Timothy, Derek, Jennifer—and their parents will stop letting him into their houses for sleepovers or playdates. That it’s just a matter of time before they catch on, and once they do, there will be no way they’ll allow such a mess, such a monster, in their houses.

  This last bit will stick. It will expand into a belief that they already know and are complaining to his parents and warning their children, his friends. He’ll worry, until they move away a few years later to a smaller town farther north and deeper in the woods, that secretly his friends and their families and even his teachers know about his problem and that there will come a day when they’ll make a spectacle of that knowing. He will imagine and sometimes think he’ll hear them say monster under their breaths.

  And so they drive. His father presses on with talk of declining house values, promises of banishment. The radio mumbles low on the station that will still, years later, remain for him the source of the gloomiest, most desolate sound, and be the station playing in every car his father owns. As they get off the highway and begin to snake along the winding Connecticut roads toward home, there is silence and the occasional click of pipe against teeth. The world outside seems to be in on all of it: the trip to the doctor and the warnings afterward part of some long-considered, collectively agreed-upon plan of action. There is nothing physically wrong with you, his father eventually shouts, exhausted no doubt by the whole day. It’s just a matter of willpower. Of choice. God only knows what kind of permanent damage you’re doing down there. What kinds of things you won’t be able to do, later.

  This last part must have been said on the way up the driveway or sitting in front of the garage because he will remember hearing the word damage as he looked up at the charcoal-colored ranch house, knowing that a new radiator and fresh wallpaper were nothing compared with what would be needed to fix him.

  Complicated Theater

  There is a bar in the Newark Airport Marriott. It’
s almost midnight and I phone the front desk and find out that last call is at one. I shower and shave and clean up as best I can before going down for a drink and company. I put in a new pair of contacts because when I’m getting high, no matter how much water I drink or how many eyedrops I empty into my eyes, the lenses dry up and pop out. I have packed four boxes of contacts for this trip, and since I’ve been in the hotel, I have already replaced the left one once and the right one twice. I know I will have to be more careful but as with everything else—drugs, money in my bank account, time—at this point there seems more than enough to last. I wear my navy cashmere turtleneck because it’s thick and cabled and hides my rickety frame; it is also expensive and, I think, obscures the cracked-out truth of me. I wear my jeans, and even though I am now cinching my belt to its last hole, I still need to tuck the front of the sweater in to keep them from falling down. I know I will have to find a leather shop in Berlin to punch new holes.

  Once I get dressed, I pace through the routine of taking a hit, guzzling a glass of vodka, going to the mirror to make sure I look okay, messing with my hair until I give up and put on the Parks & Rec Department cap. I start to get warm and a little horny and restless in my clothes, and I take my sweater off, lie down on the bed, turn on some porn, and jerk off. I wallow in the little patch of dizzy pleasure for a few minutes, and as it fades and I pour another vodka to cut the speedy buzz and mellow out the high, I think, Just one more, a big one this time to kick up my courage. And so one more. I put my sweater back on, fuss in front of the mirror, squeeze a few eyedrops in, pat down my hair, put on my cap, yank on my jeans, and before I know it I’m on the bed again, shirtless and shimmering and enjoying the short while before I need my stem, another drink, and just a little more time before I leave the room.

  I finally make it downstairs to the bar and am immediately disappointed that the place is nearly empty and dotted with a few couples and business colleagues traveling together. I don’t see the vulnerable and restless loner I’m looking for—that magical kindred partner in crime, game for a long night.

  I slam three or four vodkas and begin to get shaky. More than twenty minutes without a hit is pushing it, and I’ve been downstairs for at least half an hour. Vodka usually eases that jittery feeling, smooths the little wrinkles of horror that slip in as a high teeters toward a crash, but it’s not helping much now. In any case, I’ve got the largest pile of crack I’ve ever seen waiting in the room and there is no good reason to stop. I signal the waiter as calmly as I can, leave two twenties and a ten with the $35 tab, and make for the elevator.

  The night swirls with thick smoke, and I go through nine of the sixteen bags by early afternoon. I have never smoked so much in such a short time—two bags, shared with at least one other person would normally be a big night—and my skin tingles with heat and I’m aware of every breath and every heartbeat. All my clothes and toiletries are scattered around the hotel room and still I have too much left to smoke to make leaving the room seem like a good idea. I call the cabdriver from last night and leave a dozen messages. He doesn’t call back. It takes hours to pack and clean up, with hundreds of pit stops to smoke and drink along the way.

  With three hours before the flight, I finally make my way down through the lobby. As I check out, I notice, near the door, five or six men between the ages of forty and sixty. Each has some distinct but unspecific quality—gray slacks, grim shoes, Windbreaker. Head-to-toe JCPenney. They mumble to one another and it seems—though it’s not exactly clear—that they all have earpieces with wires tucked discreetly into their shirts. There is no one else in the lobby. Only one cab waits at the taxi stand. I hear, That’s him, from one of them, or I think I do, as I make my way through the electric doors to the breezeway outside. As I get into the taxi, I notice all five or six of them leaving the hotel and heading toward two or three cars parked in front of the building. The driver gives me a knowing look and states more than asks, Continental, which is of course my airline, but how does he know? I ask him and he says, It’s Newark, everyone flies Continental. I look at his ID displayed in the Plexiglas partition and see that the photo, just like the one in the cab yesterday, is obscured by a piece of cardboard. I begin to panic. He starts the car, pulls away from the hotel, and as I watch the cars filled with the JCPenney guys follow us, I know I am, right now, crossing over from one world into another. I can already imagine myself remembering this cab ride, how it will signal the end of the time when I was free.

  I’m about to be arrested. I have a bag of crack and a very used pipe folded in tissue in the front pocket of my jeans. I don’t see how I can get rid of it. Throw it out the window? No, these guys, whoever they are, are right on our tail. Stash it in the garbage when we pull up? No, same reason. Stuff it in the seat cushion of a car that is probably being driven by an undercover DEA agent? Obviously no. Swallow it? Maybe. But the glass pipe… what do I do with the glass pipe? These solutions flash and burst, one by one, again and again, as we crawl toward the terminal. None are possible.

  Before I left the hotel room, it seemed like a good idea to bring along enough crack to get high in an airport bathroom just before getting on the plane. As the terminal comes into view, I realize, too late, how insane this idea is. We pull up to the drop-off zone and I notice that one of the cars is directly behind us. I look away as I get out of the cab and pay the driver, who seems indifferent to the fare.

  As I make my way into the building, my only thought is when. When will they tap my shoulder and ask me to empty my pockets and open my bags. At the check-in counter? In the security line? The gate? It doesn’t seem possible that I’ll ever make it to the gate.

  Pilots in their uniforms walk in their particular way toward their flights. I imagine their sunny families in the nice but not so affluent suburbs of Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York. Their sons who collect little model airplanes and show off by knowing all the names—Cessna, Piper Cub, Mooney, 747. I can see my father’s TWA captain’s uniform and hat hung up on the old-fashioned coatrack in his den and remember how handsome I thought he was when I was young. How he looked like a movie star in those dark pressed pants and crisp white shirts. My father. How did this happen, I imagine him asking when he hears about what is about to go down. How did it come to this, Willie?

  There is little distance between the check-in counter and security. I have no idea what to do or where to go. If they’re going to arrest me, why haven’t they done it by now? I think of getting back in a cab and heading into the city, but I begin to doubt my perceptions. It must be the drugs, must be paranoia. I’m too small in the grand scheme of things, I reason, to warrant a battalion of JCPenney guys and a hotel stakeout.

  I need to ditch the drugs and the pipe. I see a bathroom to the left of the security area and quickly make a beeline there. As I enter, it’s empty. Two stalls and three urinals. I go to a stall with the intention of flushing the bag and the pipe, but when I get in and close the door, I see the toilet has only a trickle of water and seems to be running without stop. It won’t flush. I check the next one and it’s the same. I think maybe they’ve disabled them so I can’t flush my stuff. I feel like a trapped animal. I hear someone enter and quickly pull down my jeans and sit on the toilet. Minutes pass and I barely move. I try not to make a sound at first but then realize that of course he can see my feet and that I should pretend to behave normally. As if I am going to the bathroom. Whoever entered doesn’t leave and I begin to imagine there is actually a whole SWAT team of DEA agents and police silently filling the room. It’s almost impossible not to peek under the stall to see if there are, as I fear, a sea of boots and shoes. But part of me also wants to prolong not knowing as long as possible. To my left is a toilet paper holder and I slowly tear off some sheets and go through the motions of wiping and the audible pantomime of actually using the toilet. At some point it occurs to me that the only thing I can do is wipe down the pipe and bag for fingerprints, wrap them in toilet paper, and place them under the plasti
c casing of the dispenser. It crosses my mind to throw the crack in the toilet, let it dissolve in the water and hope the residue disappears eventually; but there is something in me that holds back, that can’t bear to watch the drugs erode to nothing. I start imagining the difference in jail sentences—ten years with a bag of crack? probation with just a pipe? Still, I wipe down the pipe and bag, wrap them carefully in toilet paper, and stash it all in the dispenser. I do this as quietly as I can and then pull up my jeans, buckle my belt, and open the door to the stall as if it is the last free second of my life.

  Standing against the wall, next to the entrance, is an airport security guard. He looks right at me as I walk to the sink to wash my hands. As I head out past him, he moves from the wall toward the stalls and our arms brush lightly against each other’s as I pass into the terminal and away from security, toward the escalator.

  I try to keep calm as I descend into the baggage area. There is no doubt in my mind that the security guard has headed straight for the toilet dispenser. I don’t look back, but I can feel the eyes of a hundred cops and agents on me as I move past the carousels and up toward another escalator. I wander for twenty minutes or so before making my way back to the security area. I stand next to the stairs going up to the third floor and watch the long line of tourists and businessmen and students waiting to take their belts and shoes off before passing through the metal detectors. I see a man wearing gray slacks, a nylon pullover, and plain shoes. He’s one of the JCPenney guys from the hotel lobby who got in the car, and now he’s here, several feet away, looking right at me. Just past him, back toward the check-in counter, is an older woman, walking slowly, pulling a suitcase on wheels and talking into a cell phone. I notice the blandness of the suitcase, her shoes, her jacket. It’s kindred somehow with his. And then, in the minutes that follow, like seeing one water tower in a city skyline and then suddenly seeing them all, I see dozens of these people. Blandly dressed, middle-aged, suitcase-pulling, cell-phone-clutching zombies whose slow, deliberate movements all appear choreographed in response to mine.