Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man

by Bill Clegg

  Noah puts his arm around me and says we’re going somewhere safe to talk. I ask where and he and John signal each other. They don’t seem to know what the next beat is, so I ask if we can get something to eat, and by that I mean, though I do not say it, something to drink. I need alcohol in my system to calm down.

  We end up in the Seventies off Third Avenue and find a Chinese restaurant with a basement dining room that is nearly empty. I immediately excuse myself to go to the bathroom and take a hard long pull on the stem. After several moments I think I hear full-blown conversations about when to haul him in outside the door. I still keep pulling on the stem. It broils in my hand and I dab the edges with cold water to cool it down.

  When I return to the table I ask the waitress for a vodka and she says they only have wine and beer, so I ask for a bottle of cold white. Noah begins to object but John turns to the waitress and says fine. It comes and I drink it down like water. I order food of some kind but when it comes I don’t touch it.

  John explains that I need to check into a psych ward immediately to avoid arrest. Noah nods as he speaks and I’m not sure what to believe. John goes on to say that there is a psychiatrist whom he knows and works with who has secured a bed in the psych ward at New York–Presbyterian Hospital. With these words an image of white sheets and kind nurses and locked doors flashes behind my eyes, and for the first time since Noah and John showed up at the hotel, I feel relief. I can imagine a long sleep there and drugs to calm me down, and without thinking anymore about it, I agree to see the psychiatrist.

  A few blocks away we enter a building that looks like an abandoned elementary school. We walk down wide empty halls before arriving at a door straight out of a forties detective movie—frosted glass, stenciled letters. Again, the sense that John has rigged an elaborate sting operation to arrest me rises up like bile. The wine had calmed my panic but it’s now back, and at high volume. A frizzy-haired woman in jeans and paisley top comes to the door and greets John with a wide smile. Undercover cop, I think instantly. She gives my arm a tender squeeze and asks us to follow her. He’s just finishing up with someone now, she calls over her shoulder as she guides us past a room of empty desks and toward a corner office.

  I ask if there is a bathroom and she offers to show me the way before John and Noah can say anything. I walk with her back into the hall and to a door marked MEN. It’s empty, and as fast as I can, I turn on the water in the sink and jump into a stall. The stem is still crammed with drugs so as soon as I find the lighter I fire up a hit, inhale as much smoke as will fit in my lungs, hold it there for as long as I can, and blow the thick cloud out the open window by the stall. Light comes in from outside and dapples the black-and-white tile floor, and for a moment I forget all the people waiting for me. There’s a knock on the bathroom door as it opens, and it’s Noah.

  Everything okay? he asks, and his face registers the smell of smoke in the room. Have you been getting high? he asks, and I say, No, let’s go. He hugs me and tells me how relieved he is that I’m alive, and I’m tempted to fall into his arms, let him sweep all this mess away, but I suspect he is only pulling me close to pat down my jacket and jeans to find the stem and lighter. I wriggle away from him and head to the hall.

  The psychiatrist looks like he’s from the eighties. Striped red-and-white shirt, suspenders, big horn-rim glasses, wide-wale cords, yellow socks, and tasseled loafers. His hair is curly, and from the half smile he uses with me, I get the feeling he’s done a fair bit of drugs himself. He tells me there’s a bed ready at the hospital but that it won’t be there for long. He signals Noah and John to leave his office and we sit there for a while without speaking. You high? he asks, and I tell him yes. Good, he says, enjoy it while it lasts. He asks what I do, he talks about the books he likes, and then cuts the meeting short and says, Take it or leave it.

  I’ll leave it, I say as I get up from the chair. John and Noah jump up as I come through the door and ask what went on, and I tell them I’m done with this, that I’m leaving. John tells me that I can expect to be arrested before the day is over. His tone is severe, and at this point he genuinely seems alarmed. I shuffle in place and don’t know what to do. I’m panicked but I still have money in my account and think if I can just get a pile of sleeping pills and a gallon of vodka I can probably keep this going a few more days and then end it. I am in the waiting room of a psychiatrist’s office surrounded by people most of whom I don’t know and I begin to sway from the many nights without sleep, the hit I just took in the bathroom, and the wine from before. My head roars with the talk of cops at the apartment, DEA files, getting arrested. I freeze. I stand there and have no idea what to do. I want to run. I want to collapse. I don’t want to be arrested. I want Noah to hold me. I want to get high and wipe all this away. I want to be wiped away.

  John finally says, Why don’t you just hang on, let’s slow down. I know a guy at the Carlyle Hotel a few blocks away who can secure a safe room for you to rest in and think about what to do. Let’s just dial this down a little and get you somewhere safe. Somewhere safe sounds good, and for the first time all day I trust John, have a new sense that he is who he says he is and that he’s just trying to keep me from taking off into the city and getting arrested. I agree.

  Within an hour I’m in a large, old-fashioned-looking room at the Carlyle with John’s colleague, Brian. Brian is quiet and tall and in his midtwenties. John asks Noah to go rest at home and says we will all convene in the morning. Noah’s eyes are worried as he gets up from the bed where he’s been sitting. Call me if you need anything, he says, and leans in to give me a hug. I squeeze him lightly, with my body held away, careful not to let my jacket pocket, where the stem and lighter are, graze his hands. The second he and John walk out the door I am relieved. I walk over to the phone, call room service, and order a large bottle of Ketel One and a bucket of ice. I am crashing and it’s time for vodka. Brian says nothing, just sits in a chair and watches quietly.

  The vodka comes right away and I stuff a big water glass with ice and fill it to the brim. I ask Brian if he wants any and he laughs and says, No, thank you. I swallow down two drinks swiftly and pour a third. I tell Brian I need to take a shower and he says to go right ahead. I bring the drink into the bathroom, lock the door, and turn the shower on. The bathroom is tiny and there is no switch for a fan. But there is a small square window above the shower and I’m soon in the shower, naked and smoking what I think will be a smallish hit, but it turns out there are two or three big hits still left. I suddenly wish I’d brought the bottle of vodka in with me. I pack hits, blow the smoke out the little window into an airshaft, let the steam rise, and soon I am loose. Brian comes to the door once and asks if I am good and I say, Just unwinding in the shower. A few minutes pass and, as in the bathroom at the psychiatrist’s office, the panic of the day melts away. I decide to save a hit in the stem for later and begin to towel off. I am humming with good energy by this point and the vodka has balanced out the jittery side of the high. Fuck it, I think as I walk out into the room with just the towel cinched low on my hips. I put my coat and jeans next to the bed and bring the vodka and the ice bucket to the nightstand. I fix another drink, find the remote control, and lie down.

  Brian, who I now notice is curly-haired and green-eyed and has a heavy five-o’clock shadow that reminds me of Noah, seems unfazed as I flip through the channels and drink. I ask him some questions about his job (mostly fishing professional athletes and celebrities out of hotel rooms and getting them into rehab) and what he did before (cop) and find out he has a girlfriend (nice girl, a nurse) and a small house upstate where he goes on weekends. I scooch the towel a little lower on my hips and ask if he minds if I look at porn. He says, Be my guest, and I find the Pay-per-view and hit Play. He sits there for a few minutes, laughs at my ridiculous gestures to seduce him, and says he needs to make a phone call.

  As he leaves the room it occurs to me that I can get Happy up here and score a bag or two. I need cash but I don�
��t worry about that part as I dig the cell phone out of my coat and dial Happy’s number as fast as I can. He picks up, I say Three hundred and two stems, the name of the hotel and address, and for him to call me when he’s downstairs. Happy sounds unfazed, and I wonder if he’s delivered here before. When I hang up, I begin pacing the room, worrying about Brian coming back. Now or never, I think or say, and quickly get dressed, leave the room, get in the elevator, and step out into the lobby of the hotel. I know I have only a few minutes to score the cash and get back to the room before Brian returns. How I’ll make the exchange of money and drugs with Happy I can’t yet imagine. As the elevator doors open I panic. I think Brian must be somewhere in the lobby and is sure to see me. I head over into Bemelmans Bar and up a flight of steps into a bathroom. It’s empty, and I duck into a stall and quickly light a hit off a pipe that is charred from so much use and finally running thin on drugs. But still I pull a decent hit and decide to smash the glass in a fistful of toilet paper and flush it. I take one more big, oily burnt-tasting hit before I crush the thing under my shoe and throw it in the toilet.

  The Carlyle’s dark bars and various ante-lobbies are a tricky maze, and I cross and recross the sitting area near a bank of phones several times and can’t find the exit. This goes on for a while, and as it does, my panic rises. I finally break out onto Madison Avenue and ask a nicely dressed woman if she knows where an ATM is. I worry she’ll think I’m mugging her or that she can tell I’m high, but she casually points to a Chase Bank across the street. I take out $800 and run back into the hotel and up to the room.

  Brian is still out when Happy calls, and not knowing any other way, and dreading the prospect of leaving the room again, I tell him to come up but that it’s going to have to be fast. A minute later he’s in the little foyer—white sweatpants, huge earphones, wordless—and though I called for $300, I ask him if he has six and he says he has four and hands me eight bags and two stems.

  The tide of relief that passes over me when the door shuts is almost as powerful as the enormous hit I pack in the shiny, clean new stem. I shove the extra stem and bags into my coat pocket, get undressed, wrap the towel around my waist, hop back on the bed, and fix a new drink. By the time Brian returns I am smoking openly and the porn is flickering on the TV screen. You scored, didn’t you? he asks, and I nod with a wicked smile on my face. Do you have any idea how close to being arrested you are? he asks, and I tell him to please relax. That I have one more night of freedom and I promise to stay put if he kicks back and lays off the talk of psych wards and cops. He agrees and sits in the chair next to the dresser.

  I go through two liters of vodka and almost three bags of crack as I lie on that bed and talk to Brian and watch porn. I steer the discussion to his girlfriend, sex, and porn, and, for hours, he will manage to keep it clean on his end without disengaging.

  At some point in the early morning he falls asleep. I oh-so-gently get off the bed and into my clothes, pack up my few things—phone, stem, drugs, lighter—and tiptoe out of the room, into the hall, and back to the world.

  Idiot Wind

  It’s a small college on the eastern shore of Maryland, and four of us are renting a house twenty minutes away from campus, on the Chesapeake Bay. It’s a blue raised ranch with aluminum siding and a deck in back, and to us it’s paradise. Ian is a dark-haired, wild-eyed boarding school hellion from New Orleans; Brooks, my roommate from the dorms, is a Cary Grant type from Maryland—Waspy, strangely old-fashioned, friend to all and enemy to none; and there’s Jake, a blue-eyed, curly-haired blond peace monkey who bartends in the summer and plays harmonica and sings in a Baltimore band called The Moonshiners.

  There is always a keg on the back porch, and in the fridge piles of lamb chops and choice cuts of beef that we steal from the grocery store in the next town. The stealing begins one afternoon when Ian and I are walking through the meat section. He stops and points to an assortment of wrapped packets of lamb chops and whispers, Billy, c’mon, unzip the pocket on the back of my coat and drop a couple of those beauties in there. Ian scrunches his face with urgency, his eyes bulge, he pleads in his particular way, Jesus, Billy, c’mon, what are you doooin’? and though I’m sure I am going to get caught, I unzip the coat, grab the meat, and slip it in. The coat is an expensive ski jacket with a wide zippered pocket on the back. It holds the meat vertically, and as Ian walks through the store and we check out, there is no sign that he’s carrying our dinner on his back. From that day on we never pay for meat. When we go shopping we take Ian’s coat.

  I read during the day, when I’m skipping class—Hardy and Fitzgerald mostly that year, Jude the Obscure a few times. On the weekends I read in my room, the one at the end of the hall, tucked away from the ruckus of the house. There is no one at school or in the house whom I talk to about what I read. I reread Salinger and Knowles and the books of my adolescence. Some of these copies still have Katherine’s scribbles in the margins, and I treat them like museum pieces.

  Every once in a while someone has coke or acid but for the most part it’s pot-around-the-clock. Ian has a red Graphics bong he cleans and recleans and strokes like a pet. I keep a constant stash in my room and smoke off a short plastic bong and listen to Rickie Lee Jones and Bob Dylan and when I’m not reading just stare at the maroon-and-brown tapestry tacked to the ceiling. We road-trip up and down the eastern seaboard—Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Roanoke, Boston, New York—to see The Dead, Dylan, Neil Young. Mostly it’s me and Ian, and mostly it’s Dylan.

  Brooks is the only one with a steady girlfriend, Shirley, who goes to school in Virginia. I hook up with two or three different girls on a regular basis—all of whom make Ian’s face wrinkle with disgust. Jesus, Billy, what are you dooooin’? he’ll say at the end of the night when it’s clear whom I’ll be taking back to my room. Jake has girls in Baltimore or in town who don’t go to college. We’ll never meet them. Ian will hook up with only one girl that I know of—a girl I have made out with a few times and whom I’ve told Ian I’ve fallen for—and it will be in the backseat of a car on a trip back from Boston while Brooks and I are in the front. We’ll see the whole thing. I’ll be mad and he’ll say he was asleep and didn’t know she was making the moves on him.

  One night Jake withdraws money from an ATM and notices a lucky bank error for a sum that makes it seem like a good idea to buy a fresh keg and have some people over. We do and we drink and it gets late and someone notices that Brooks is not with us. Someone else says he’s on campus and we decide to go find him. Ian drives, I ride shotgun, and Jake takes the back. We stop at Newt’s, a grim honky-tonk bar that has all sorts of specials to lure college kids. Fifty-cent beers to get them in the door and tipsy so that they’ll start buying shots. Which is what we do. Tequila. Ian is always several shots ahead of us, but Jake and I are eager to keep up. After last call, we put up stools and chairs and get more free shots. We are all lit in the same way, have the same streaking comet inside us, and agree that heading over to one of the girls’ dormitories is the thing to do. Find Brooks. Drag him home. And so we go. Ian blares “Idiot Wind” in the car and shouts the lyrics, You’re an eeeediot, Babe, It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe. He rocks back and forth against the steering wheel as he wails, and his black hair and red eyes gleam demonlike in the green glow of the Volkswagen dashboard.

  It’s at least two by the time we get out of the car. We are roaring drunk from the tequila and there is an unstable voltage humming in each of us. Our breath clouds and shimmers in the freezing cold March air, and we move from the car to the dorm like a three-headed monster hell bent on mischief. We tiptoe through the halls and Ian finds a fire extinguisher to bring along for the journey. He pretends to squirt us and at some point it goes off. Glorious plumes of white cloud billow out of the red canister, which is, in that instant, the most extraordinary thing we’ve ever seen. Ian points his new weapon in the opposite direction, squeezes the handle, and again, a majestic slow-motion miracle blooms out
into the hall. Jake and I need to have one, too, so we race upstairs to find two more. Jake finds one and I somehow don’t. They go on to spray each other, the halls, the doors, the floor, a girl who is sleeping. We get split up, but there is a sense that we’re still connected by some invisible electric tether and only a shout away.

  I enter a common area where someone has left a nearly finished quilt. Blue and red squares of fabric sewn together in a groovy mosaic. It reminds me of my mother, and the quilt she made me out of scraps of fabric in high school. Without thinking I gather it in my arms and book into the hall. It’s about now that I hear Ian yelling my name. Billeeeeee, c’mon, Billeeeee. Occasionally I hear him bark Jake’s name. Jake. We gotta split. Jake, c’mon. I head back to the hall. Suddenly we all run into one another, and as we do, I see girls coming out of their rooms, shouting. We race for the exit. Someone—one of us? one of the girls?—pulls the fire alarm and almost immediately we hear a siren. The car is parked up behind the bank, and we run through the side parking lot of the dorms and up through the backyard of someone’s house. Ian is in full combat mode and pushes us down behind a hedge and barks in a whisper for us to Stay the fuck quiet.

  And so we do. Police sirens, fire engines, and the fire alarm sound through the town while blue and red lights streak around us. It’s now between three and four in the morning and the campus and the surrounding neighborhood are awake. Lights flicker on in the nearby dorms and houses, people pull curtains aside and lean their heads out to see what is going on. We stay there for at least an hour and finally, when things seem to quiet down, we sneak over to Ian’s car and drive back to the house. Brooks is there and has already been called by everyone we know who heard Ian screaming our names.