Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man

by Bill Clegg

  As we walk up to the front door, Brooks looks at me in horror and says, What the fuck is that? I look down and am embarrassed to realize that I have been clutching the nearly finished quilt the whole time. I’m so nervous the cops are going to show up any minute that I stuff it into a black garbage bag and shove it under the empty house next door.

  We stay up that night, get high, worry, and wait for the phone call from school, which comes, and a day later we are thrown out. Jake never comes back. Ian and I plan to go to UC Boulder together the following fall. Brooks moves into a house with friends in town and finishes the semester.

  That spring I go down to Bedford, New York, a few times to visit Ian. His mother moved there from New Orleans when she divorced Ian’s father. I’m landscaping with a friend at home, and he’s working in a sporting goods store in White Plains. His mother is often away and his brother Sam is in the eighth grade and generally around. Usually Ian scores coke from a friend in Rye and we smoke pot and throw a Frisbee in the afternoon, and at night do lines, drink good beer, and play caps—a game where two people sit on either side of a room and throw beer caps at empty cups placed between their legs until their thumbs bleed from pressing too hard against the serrated metal edges.

  One weekend in Bedford we drink so much Guinness and smoke so much weed that by the time the lines come out I’ve already vomited. We stay up all of Saturday and most of Sunday night and on Monday I am supposed to meet Miho, my family’s former Japanese exchange student, in Manhattan. She’s in town for the day, and my mother has asked and I’ve agreed to take her around.

  Monday at noon seems a lifetime away as we blare Dylan and do line after line on the breakfast table in Ian’s kitchen. We run out around five o’clock Monday morning, take sleeping pills with a few more beers, and head to bed. I’m in a guest room, and at eight o’clock I wake up and suddenly feel wrong. It takes a minute or two to realize that not only have I peed and shit the bed but vomited all over myself. Ian’s mother is coming home that day. My head is stinging, and I panic that Ian will find out. I creep from the bed, take off my soiled underwear and T-shirt, and go to the bathroom to rinse the more substantial mess off. I take a shower and then, sheet by sheet, pillow case by pillow case, dismantle the bed and put my clothes on from the night before, which reek of pot and are covered in beer stains. I flip the now-stained mattress, gather up the soiled underwear, T-shirt, and linens, and tiptoe as gently as possible out into the hall, down the stairs, and into the basement, where for some reason I know there is a washer and dryer. I empty the load that’s in the washing machine, put it in a basket, and replace it with the horrible load.

  Every button I push, cleaning product I open, and door I shut sounds like a rifle shot, and I’m convinced Ian will rumble down the stairs and bellow his trademark What are you doooing? Ian could load that phrase with an empire of disgust and contempt. This is a guy who loved Bob Dylan, thought every other musician was a fraud, couldn’t stand the state of Maryland, any fat girl or woman, and most everything else that wasn’t from Louisiana. I am his friend, but it generally feels like that fragile status is only one wrong band or shitted bed away from being revoked.

  I don’t want to make any more noise on the stairs, so I sit down there while the clothes wash and dry. Eventually they dry, and by this time it’s nearly eleven. I make the bed, gather my things, and call a taxi. I wake Ian up to say good-bye and he scrunches his face and says, Jeeeesus, Billy, you look like shit.

  This is the last time I see Ian. He won’t get into Boulder. I will, but my father will insist that I go back to Maryland and face the wreckage there, which I do. Brooks and I will be roommates until I graduate, and Jake will go back to Baltimore, where he will—and I suspect still does—bartend and play guitar.

  I arrive at Rockefeller Center over an hour late for Miho. My clothes reek and the black Aspen cap on my head—one of Ian’s, one I wore nearly every day then—is covered with lint and detritus of all kinds from the night before. There is bile rising up at the back of my throat, and I have already thrown up twice on the train.

  Miho looks annoyed and impeccable. She has on a yellow Chanel-like suit, red pumps, and a blouse that is so white I can’t face it without squinting. She is nineteen but looks like a seasoned executive or a newscaster well into her thirties. She eyes me warily and asks if I am okay. I tell her, Sort of, and ask where she wants to go. I should have known: Saks Fifth Avenue, Tiffany, Cartier, Bergdorf, Bonwit Teller, Gucci. We spend the day in places where the security guards keep a close eye on me. It is one of the longest days of my life, and I pop into several delis along the way for aspirin and water.

  The city seems like an animated cartoon that I have entered through some great cosmic accident. The security guards are the only ones who notice me: to all others I’m invisible. The ragged shorts, the Aztec cloth belt, the Snowbird T-shirt, and the Aspen cap (neither are places I’d been) are a uniform for another world altogether and not one I’m even comfortable in. People seem so sure of themselves, so securely in their lives as they march up and down Fifth and Madison avenues. Some don’t look that much older than me, but they seem carved from matter and shaped by forces I can’t even imagine. I will remember them later, often, and they will seem as the city does: golden, magical, daunting.

  I don’t return to New York for another three years. This is after college, and I’m with my girlfriend Marie, who is nine years older than I am. She sets up an informational meeting with a friend of hers, a book editor at a publishing company—one of the few I’m aware of because it is the house named on the title pages of the Salinger and Dickinson books I’ve read and reread. I resist and she insists that I at least explore book publishing, which she seems to think is where I belong. I play along a little with her fantasy, but it’s as if I were five or six, talking to the big kids at the town beach about diving off the high dive: fun to pretend, impossible to do.

  The meeting is one block from Rockefeller Center. The book editor looks at my résumé—the one Marie helped me put together—and frowns. He points to the assistants on the floor outside his office and lets me know that most of them went to Ivy League schools, some of them for both undergraduate and graduate degrees, and that my academic career and job experience are a far cry from anything that would get me in the door at a publishing house like this one. It is exactly as I feared and I am nauseous with shame. Marie is waiting for me by the ice-skating rink, where they light the big Christmas tree each year, I think. I lie and tell her the editor was encouraging, that he thinks there may be something there down the line, just not now. She says, See, I told you so, and I agree.

  As we have coffee later that day and run an errand for her mother at Brooks Brothers, I am again aware of the security guards, as I was years before with Miho, and believe they can see what I know and Marie seems blind to: that I don’t belong here. That this is a place for a sleeker, smarter, better-educated, and altogether finer grade of person. I get on the train that afternoon in Grand Central, thinking the same thing I thought that hungover day three years ago: This is the last time. And: What if it’s not?

  Beginnings of the End

  His first drink is his father’s—Scotch—from the bottle, in the woods, with Kenny. They are twelve. It’s fall and the leaves are bright around them and everywhere there is the sweet smell of mulchy decay, of rot. They swipe a bottle from the liquor cabinet and scamper down the logging trail with a pack of his mother’s cigarettes and a Playboy calendar Kenny has gotten from the pharmacy in the next town over.

  It tastes bad but he loves it, loves the strange warmth in his chest and the sting in his throat. He has only three or four swigs but it’s enough to make him woozy. Enough to give him a toehold in a blurry, blissful place. A place where he doesn’t have to bring himself along. What he also loves is the dark project of it. The sneaking into the woods. The stealthy plans, the covert moves. The intimacy of an illicit collaboration. They giggle, the way they always do. Kenny stops at one sw
ig, wincing at the taste. They barely smoke a cigarette and they howl at more than ogle the naked calendar girls. They will do this together only a few more times. It is, however, just the beginning of his stealing from his father’s liquor cabinet. Instead of the woods, he’ll bring it to his room, sip it in his window seat from a red-and-orange-striped thermos, and listen to the crickets outside, Bob Dylan, Cat Stevens, Neil Young. He’ll barely hear the racket of the house below. This will go on until he leaves for college.

  His first drug is a line of crystal meth when he’s fifteen. It happens in a cooler in the little market where he works in high school and, later, on breaks from college. The place stays open until ten and sells things like sandwiches, cereal, cigarettes, and gas. A guy named Max who works there gives it to him. Max is older, a sort of bad boy with a dealer girlfriend, someone he’s talked to about drugs and inhaled cases of Reddi-wip with ever since they started working nights together. Max offers to give him a try one night and goes into the cooler to set it up—a short, thin line on a box of mozzarella sticks, with a rolled-up dollar bill—behind cases of eggs and soda and half and half. It stings his nose and at first he feels nothing. But then he gets the jolt, the speedy lift Max talks about, and soon he wants another.

  They do this off and on for years. Setting up lines in the cooler, ringing up customers, and sipping beer that he keeps under the deli counter. Sometimes it will be cocaine, sometimes crystal. He never really knows the difference, or cares. It passes the time and gives the job a fizziness and sheen that make it bearable.

  Pot comes a little later and then it’s always around, until he’s thirty or so. He’ll smoke it nearly every day in college and off and on in his twenties until one night it will taste funny, make him antsy and queasy, and after this it will hold no appeal.

  The first time he smokes crack. He never tells this story. Instead he usually says he tried it at a party, that he was pulled into a bedroom by someone he knew, a couple, a friend, someone he didn’t know. It’s someone different every time. The phony story always sounds less shameful to him, less weird, more normal, even glamorous. But that’s not how it happens.

  There is a lawyer from his hometown, let’s call him Fitz. He’s a big fish in the small pond of that small town. His house is large, old, and, in the eyes of those who care about such things, important. He and his wife are social. They belong to the country club, drive beat-up old Volvos and Mercedes, carry monogrammed Bean tote bags everywhere. Everyone knows Fitz.

  One early evening in New York he sees Fitz. Fitz sees him. They are somewhere near the small literary agency where he now works, somewhere in the East Fifties. He’ll always think it’s in the bookstore in the Citicorp building but he’s never sure. He is twenty-five now, maybe twenty-six. Fitz says hello first. He’s in his sixties, well over six feet tall, silver-haired and handsome in the way the headmaster of a boarding school is handsome. Fitz wears a striped oxford shirt rolled at the sleeves, and liver spots speckle the skin of his hands and forearms.

  Why don’t we grab a drink at my place, Fitz suggests. And so they go. Soon, twenty blocks away, they are at Fitz’s apartment. Both have vodka—he talks about his kids, this one in the Midwest, that one in Bermuda, and one finishing law school in DC. The apartment is in Murray Hill, a large two-bedroom in an old co-op. It smells faintly of mothballs and is decorated like the office of a college admissions officer. The busy print on the simple couch and chairs is navy and burgundy, the curtains are beige, and the dark wood coffee table, its hinges tarnished brass, is covered with family photographs.

  A few drinks in and they’re talking about college and sex and booze and drugs, and though it should have been perfectly obvious before, he suddenly realizes that Fitz—despite the important house, the kids, the wife, the tote bags—is hitting on him. He’s rubbed his neck a few times on the way to the kitchen to fetch more drinks; has moved from the opposite chair to the couch next to him and squeezed his thigh a few times as they talk.

  Fitz is telling him now about how every once in a while he likes to get high. Pot mostly, but occasionally something stronger. Fitz asks him if he’s ever free-based and he says, without hesitating, yes. He hasn’t, but it’s occurred to him. He’s wondered about it, imagined what it would be like, but it didn’t seem to be something he’d ever encounter. Free-basing meant crack, and crack was the stuff of gritty drug busts written up in the Metro section of the New York Times and, he thinks, confined mainly to projects and jails. All through the eighties, when he was in high school, crack made headlines for ruining neighborhoods, driving up crime, being famously addictive. A hideous, monstrous scourge, utterly taboo. Something he has always been drawn to, something he has always wanted to try.

  He has known only one person who smoked crack: Jackie DiFiore. He and Jackie grew up in the same town where Fitz lives and works. She was four years older and always getting into trouble. She eventually dropped out of high school and, it was rumored, moved to Albany, New York, to live with a black man and became a crack addict. Jackie’s story was the most popular cautionary tale parents in their town used to illustrate What Happens When You Use Drugs.

  Many years after the night with Fitz, he will remember Mrs. Parsons, his piano teacher when he was twelve. A heavyset Irishwoman who lived down the road who it seemed had at least eight children. She smoked and drank and gossiped and lived with all those kids in a small green house at the edge of a swamp. It looked like a witch’s house and sort of sagged into the hill behind it. One day he showed up for his lesson and it became instantly clear that he hadn’t practiced. Again. After he’d fumbled a little over a simple étude, she grabbed his hands and told him to stop. I can see it now, she thundered. You’re going to grow up and be a crack addict, just like Jackie DiFiore. No doubt in my mind. You are two peas in a pod.

  Fitz goes into the bedroom and comes back with a small vial of what look like chunky milk-colored crystals. He pulls a clear glass tube from his pocket, something he calls a stem, and packs one end with small wire mesh and then a few small bits of the drug, or crumbs, as he says. Fitz carefully hands him the stem and tells him to put it to his lips as he pulls out a lighter. The glass tube is delicate and his hands are shaky. He’s afraid he’ll spill the drugs but somehow he does not. Fitz flicks on the lighter and passes the flame close to the end of the stem. He draws slowly as he sees the white substance bubble and pop in the flame. A pearly smoke makes its way down the stem, and he draws harder to bring it toward him. Fitz tells him to go gently and he does. Soon his lungs are full and he holds it the way he would hold pot smoke. He exhales and is immediately coughing. The taste is like medicine, or cleaning fluid, but also a little sweet, like limes. The smoke billows out into the living room, past Fitz, like a great unfurling dragon. As he watches the cloud spread and curl, he feels the high at first as a flutter, then a roar. A surge of new energy pounds through every inch of him, and there is a moment of perfect oblivion where he is aware of nothing and everything. A kind of peace breaks out behind his eyes. It spreads down from his temples into his chest, to his hands and everywhere. It storms through him—kinetic, sexual, euphoric—like a magnificent hurricane raging at the speed of light. It is the warmest, most tender caress he has ever felt and then, as it recedes, the coldest hand. He misses the feeling even before it’s left him and not only does he want more, he needs it.

  Meanwhile, a silver-haired, handsome man from home has his arm around him, is stroking his leg and telling him he’s going to pack another hit, a bigger one, that they can share. This second time he tries as hard as he can to go slow, but Fitz says he’s still drawing too hard, that he’ll burn the stem. He barely pulls and again his lungs are full. Again he coughs and again, but bigger this time, there is this blast of feeling and not feeling, awareness of nothing and everything, a furious energy that makes him go still. Fitz takes the stem back and, after it cools, packs his own hit. While Fitz inhales, he motions him to come toward his lips and it’s clear that he is offering to
exhale smoke into his mouth. And he does, and they start kissing.

  Nothing before this has been as thrilling. This raging tempest streaking through his system as he kisses a man—the second or third he’s kissed—who is older than his father, whom he’s seen in the grocery store and library of his tiny town his whole life. They will make out, get naked, and move the whole project of stems and drugs and kissing into the bedroom. It will be a dizzy blur of smoke and skin, and it will be the only time he ever does this drug where doom does not eclipse bliss, where the two aren’t immediately at war. Doom will hit when he leaves a few hours later and realizes it’s near midnight and that he is in no shape to see Nell, his girlfriend—the person he has lived with for more than two years despite his growing attraction to men.

  Before he leaves Fitz’s apartment he goes into the bathroom and carefully washes his hands, which have grown sooty and burnt from the hot stem. He washes his face and fixes his hair so it doesn’t look like he’s been thrashing around for hours. He checks his clothes, brushes off his blazer, makes sure all his shirt buttons are buttoned, his collar is straight, his fly zipped. Behind the locked door, in the tiny bathroom off the entryway, he runs through all of this—swiftly, mechanically—at least a dozen times. It’s as if he’s on autopilot, or responding to some primal, animal instinct to transform from one state to another. He pulls up his socks, rubs the spots off his shoe, and wipes his brow once more. As he checks his hair and gargles with the mouthwash he finds in the medicine cabinet, Fitz knocks a few times to make sure everything is okay. Be right out, he calls as he takes one last look in the mirror.

  He hunts for a cab on Lexington and hopes Nell has gone to sleep. He is startled how time has changed shape, how six hours has felt like a few minutes. He worries he’s left something behind. He’s not sure what exactly—he has his wallet, his keys, his tie bunched in his blazer pocket—but he’s sure something is now missing.