by Bobi Conn
To the City
During my freshman year and the summer that followed, I worked at Denny’s with a girl who had gone to Berea College for a time—Tanya was a cook and not at all the waitressing type. Since she didn’t have a car, I gave her rides to and from work, and soon we were friends of sorts.
Tanya was hesitant to do meth as often as I did, but we smoked a little weed together and drank a little and stayed up all night. That summer, we decided to go to a music festival in Atlanta. We planned to leave after work one evening, drive through the night, and find a hotel down there. Taking my cue from my father, I brought a few Lortabs with us to help us stay up all night. We stopped at a Waffle House sometime around eleven that evening, already exhausted from working and being up for a regular day.
We took turns going into the bathroom to snort our Lortabs. We ate a little something, she drank coffee, and we got back on the road. We were driving the boxy white Ford that Granny had lent me—James had taken our car, which his grandparents bought us. We had sold my baby-blue Dodge Aries and bought something else, and that something else had died from a lack of oil—I had used a coupon for a free oil change, but the mechanic didn’t tighten the oil filter.
I had brought as much money as I could, so I could buy something at the festival to bring back and resell—something psychedelic. I drove all night, minding my father’s demand that I not let anyone else drive Granny’s car. We got into Atlanta around four thirty in the morning and went to a shabby motel. While we were checking in, we saw some people our age getting out of a minivan at the entrance. They came in and booked a room, and we thought that though they didn’t quite have the hippie look we expected, they might be going to the same festival. Their room was a few doors down from ours, so we managed to introduce ourselves as we all carried our stuff into our rooms, and before long, they offered to sell us some liquid LSD.
They had come to Atlanta from Florida not to attend the actual concert but to walk around the festival parking lot and sell their acid. I immediately bought a few doses, and they insisted we needed to get sugar cubes, so they could drop each dose onto a cube. I had dispensed the liquid into people’s mouths before, but once accidentally gave someone three or four drops when he wanted one, so I knew the dangers of imprecise measurement.
We went driving around Atlanta as the sun rose, going into every all-night grocery store we could find. We seemed to be in a residential area, but next to nice-looking houses, prostitutes stood on the street corners while morning climbed into the sky. It was my first time in a real city, and looking around, I saw nothing that would make me want to come back.
We finally found sugar cubes and returned to our motel. Tanya and I took two drops apiece, and I bought some more to take home with us—one or two breath-freshener bottles filled with cinnamon-flavored LSD. It was about eight thirty in the morning by that time, and as soon as I took the acid, I decided I needed to sleep.
Sleeping doesn’t normally come easily on LSD, and Tanya tried to convince me to stay awake. I couldn’t, though, and we both lay down on our bed and quickly dropped off. When I awoke, I sat up and found the hotel room spinning. I was scared for a moment, then remembered what I had taken and tried to reassure myself that everything was okay. Tanya awoke then, and we decided to go to the motel pool, where we swam around a bit in the heat. In the water, I wondered whether I would drown or whether my body remembered swimming so well that it would keep itself alive even while I was in an altered state, like it had done when I faced my father’s temper, or when I was pulled to the older boy’s lap in church—kept alive despite all my desperate fears.
When we got out of the pool, we took a cab to the festival parking lot, so we wouldn’t have to drive back. The parking lot was full of cars and buses and vans, and the heat bounced off the black asphalt at us, while the sun blazed down without clouds or winds to subdue it. Like everyone else, we walked around for hours, waiting for something good to happen, avoiding the cops that argued with people over their drinks or their dogs, and we especially avoided the cops who were searching through people’s pockets and cars.
I started looking for a nitrous balloon right away. I had tried nitrous when I was sixteen and James took me to his friend’s dorm room. I knelt at his friend’s nitrous tank, taking it all in, and went fishing, meaning I had inhaled so much at once, depriving my brain of any oxygen, that I passed out and fell over, almost hitting my head on the concrete floor. After that first encounter with nitrous, I had walked away from campus and back toward my house feeling angry, thinking that something inside me had changed. I hoped it was not a permanent change, but part of me also thought that I didn’t care about anything anymore. At that time, I didn’t know my dad had a taste for nitrous himself and had paralyzed the woman while driving the oxygen truck, or that he sometimes had a tank in his and Mom’s bedroom. He would tell me about it later.
When I was still sixteen, I tried nitrous again at another festival, and I discovered that people sold it in balloons, inflating them to unreasonable sizes, and I could walk around with a balloon in my mouth, inhaling the sickeningly sweet gas until my thoughts disappeared and everything felt less like pain and more like floating.
Tanya and I were still feeling the effects of the liquid LSD we had taken, which was powerful but not overwhelming. We walked and walked, waiting for the hours to pass until the show began. I wondered whether we would somehow have an exciting adventure. I did not feel at all capable of talking to the strangers in the parking lot, who all appeared to know what they were doing. They, it seemed, were part of the adult world, while I was somehow still part of a child world. Everyone else came across as knowing what they wanted and did not mind asking each other for it, even when most of us were looking for drugs. Tanya was unusually quiet where she was usually assertive, and I started thinking we were a bad pair—her confidence often made me feel even less sure of myself, and I wondered if my fear of people was bringing out her own lack of confidence.
Suddenly, a man walked up to her, and after a few words, they began kissing there in the parking lot, surrounded by people and me wondering what the hell had just happened. He had olive skin and black hair and a goatee. He talked to my friend while I stood there, dazed and uncertain what was going on. We followed him to a van, and he got something out of the back, then turned to Tanya and handed it to her. She ripped a piece of paper in half and told me to stick out my tongue. So I did.
Okay, now leave that in your mouth for a while, she said, and we started walking away from the exotic man and his van.
Wait, what was that? I asked.
That was about twenty-five hits of acid, she said. That scared me. I demanded to know what she was thinking, taking so much at once, and she told me to calm down, and I did. It was too late by that point anyway—the LSD had already absorbed into my tongue and was getting ready to have its way with my brain. Later, as we walked around and waited for the acid to kick in, she saw the man again and once more took what he handed her, ripped it in two, and put half on my tongue. This time, I didn’t protest at all.
When the gates finally opened, we went in and found a place on the grassy lawn of the outdoor amphitheater. I tried to dance to the first band, which I had liked for a few years. The second band came on, and I gave up on dancing, which my body didn’t seem to remember how to do. I lay on the grass, staring at a few clouds above me. As the music played, I watched the edges of the clouds swirl into fractals, like the endlessly recursive patterns of snowflakes and the Windows 95 screen saver. The headlining band came on, and I listened as the sky darkened. I was too affected by the LSD to stand most of the time, and I could hardly speak, it had hit me with such intensity. Once again, nothing made sense, but this time, it wasn’t scary and confusing. I let the world wash over me for hours, bathing me in sound and color as if my mind had never grown used to such things.
When the show ended, we walked up the hill and out through the gate, back into the parking lot. People were everywhere, hawking their w
ares and laughing, calling out to one another and calling for their dogs. I knew I had to function but still wasn’t sure how to, so I just followed Tanya. She wanted to hurry back to the motel, as the man with the powerful paper was supposed to call for her there. We hustled to the parking lot entrance, where a police officer directed the stream of traffic outward. All the cabs were spoken for, and finding an empty one seemed like a lost cause, so we started walking toward the closest building, which was almost a mile away. When we got there, we found a dilapidated garage with a few people sitting inside. I wondered why they were working at that hour and what kind of work they did in that strange garage, but they seemed decidedly indifferent to us as we used the phone to call a taxi service.
We walked back to the amphitheater parking lot and found an open taxi, though it wasn’t the one we had called for. We jumped in the back, relieved to be off our feet. As we started moving, Tanya yelled, Wait! Where’s my wallet? What the fuck happened to my wallet? Somebody stole my wallet! The cabbie stopped the taxi under the traffic light we had inched beneath, turned around, and demanded to know who had the money to pay the fare—he wasn’t driving anybody anywhere unless they could pay.
As he was yelling about the fare and Tanya was frantically searching for her wallet, a policeman started banging on the hood of the cab, yelling at the cabbie to move the car out of the intersection—all the traffic in front of us had moved on, and we sat there, in the middle of everything, everyone waiting for us to go. Tanya jumped out of the taxi and started running down the sidewalk, so I jumped out and followed her. She ran toward the garage, and we made it almost the whole way running, until the cigarettes and the meth and maybe even the nitrous slowed us down, and we walked as quickly as we could the rest of the way. We burst in, and everyone looked at us with the same disinterest as before. My friend hurriedly started talking about her wallet and went to the phone, where she had laid her wallet down and it had sat the whole time, unnoticed and undisturbed.
Wallet in hand, we went back to the parking lot, where we got a cab once again. When we arrived at the motel, she started talking about the man she had met, how they had locked eyes in the parking lot and that she felt it was something special, something incredible she had to pursue when he called for her. The next morning, when she was dropped off back at our room, I was glad I had stayed.
Her new soul mate had taken her back to his hotel room, where his wife and their three children were staying. She slept in the bed with them, the man’s wife separating her from her new love. He spent the night reaching over his wife and trying to touch my friend, and his wife spent the night pushing him back to his spot on the bed.
How can so many lonely people be in one place together? Each of us reaching out, over and over, slapped away or left behind, hungry in a way that always seems to be our very own.
CHAPTER 22
Faithful
After we got back, James started spending time with Tanya, who ended up with a roommate named Rebecca. One day, I came home to find that my six-pack of Samuel Adams Cherry Wheat was missing, and a wet towel was hanging on the shower rod. When I confronted James a couple of days later, it turned out he had let himself in—I usually didn’t lock the door—and taken a shower, then took the beer with him as a thank-you to the girls for letting him crash at their apartment. I began locking my door so he couldn’t take anything, but soon, I came home to find the television missing—he had climbed in through an unlocked window and taken it so they could watch a movie. I resorted to putting a board in the window to keep him from climbing in.
Rebecca had started working with us at Denny’s, and I was still the only one of us with a car, so I would often give the other two girls a ride, and the three of us would hang out sometimes. I didn’t know Rebecca well, but one day, when I brought Tanya home, we all stood around chatting, and I noticed Rebecca had a pained look on her face. Eventually, I asked what was wrong, and Tanya told me, She’s afraid you’re going to be mad at her because she slept with James.
After a shocked silence, I told Rebecca no, it was fine—James was single, and they were adults and free to make their own choices. I hated it, but I knew I had no right to be upset. I assured her there were no hard feelings, but I did put two and two together that he had brought my beer to her, and they shared it, as well as some LSD, prior to their rendezvous. The girls didn’t realize it was my beer he brought over that day and assured me they wouldn’t let him do that again.
A few days later, I decided to call James. He had gone to stay at his mom’s in Lexington. When she put him on the phone, I told him that I was sorry for my part in what had happened between us and that I would always care about him.
I felt so guilty about being a bad wife, and undeserving of a right to be angry with him, to ever be angry with anyone but myself. I felt I needed to rid myself of all those lower-consciousness feelings and focus on the best ones. Like the religion of my childhood, all that I read or learned about living a good life, being a good person, I interpreted as confirmation that something was wrong with me. I just had to try harder. It made me feel better, though, to tell him, Everything is okay, you are okay. I knew that my anger with him was at least partially justified, but I was happy to give him the forgiveness I thought he must be wanting. It was the same story I had always told myself about my father—that deep down he knew he was doing wrong and that, with my love, he could be the good person he truly was inside.
James responded that he would always care about me, too, and I told him that I knew he was enjoying being single but that I missed him and hoped the best for him.
What do you mean, enjoying being single?
Well, you know, you’re single now, and you’re a good-looking guy, so I’m sure you’re going to have some fun. You know what I mean.
He insisted he didn’t know what I meant, so finally I told him, Come on, it’s okay. I know you slept with Rebecca.
No, he insisted—that absolutely did not happen. He was horrified they had told me that, and said both of those girls were sick, twisted people to do such a cruel thing to me. He told me to please stop hanging out with them, since they were obviously trying to hurt me. Eventually we hung up, and I sat there, once again, in shock.
We all worked together the next day, and Rebecca was especially friendly. I didn’t tell them what James had said but observed them for a couple of days to see whether I could detect any psychotic tendencies. One night, one of our mutual friends, someone James had played with in a band for a while, came over to play chess, and I told him all about it. I was confused about who to believe and didn’t understand why the girls would lie to me.
With a sigh, he told me no, they weren’t lying to me, that it was James who was lying. I asked him how he knew, and he told me he knew because James was dating my best friend and didn’t want her to find out about him sleeping with Rebecca.
I had met my best friend in the argumentation and debate class. On the first day of class, our professor told us to pair up for our first debate exercise, and she and I locked eyes. A boy asked me whether I wanted to be partners, while another boy asked her the same thing. I stumbled over my words, saying I thought she and I were going to be partners, and eventually moved close enough to her desk to ask, and she had the same experience of stumbling over how to say no to the guy who asked her.
From then on, we were inseparable. People thought we were sisters, and we would sometimes tell them that we were and even that we were twins. We soon discovered we had also both experienced weird things growing up—weird fathers and strange families. Fragments of memories and feelings that didn’t quite make sense. She was willing to try most drugs that I tried, but she didn’t seek them out or use them as often as I did. I thought of her as the more wholesome of the two of us. She certainly didn’t come off as being as wild as I was. We both looked, at least on the outside, like happy, somewhat-ditzy hippie girls.
We had drifted apart toward the end of the school year—I had grown impatient wit
h her naivete. Arguing about rocks having souls, impassioned pleas to protect box turtles from four-wheelers—all this seemed less and less important to me as I had become more critical of my own ideas. And though she was highly tolerant of my endless experiments with drugs, I imagine that my near-constant use of crystal meth at that point didn’t help.
I’m not sure I could even tell you now exactly what I felt when I arranged to meet James and my best friend in the parking lot of a vegetarian café in Lexington to clear the air, as he suggested. I had decided I wanted to go ahead and clear everything, so I brought Rebecca and Tanya. There was a little bit of confrontation between the girls and James, a little bit of us all looking lost, and I bid the new lovers farewell.
Soon after that, a woman who was eating at Denny’s asked me whether I would like to work at the local health-food store, which I jumped at. Soon I was high on crystal meth at the store, not so carefully rationing my paycheck for organic vegannaise and nutritional yeast, as well as the meth. I cleaned, ran the cash register, and soon began closing the store. I remember sweeping next to the cooler, fully immersed in my resentment, until one day a voice told me, You have every right to your anger. Nobody will ever take that away from you. But it is hurting only you.
So I tried to stop. I tried to forgive, to love my husband, ex-husband to be. To love my friend, who surely was only giving love the chance it deserves, no matter the circumstances. I failed.
I didn’t know how to forgive someone while still honoring myself. And despite reading so much about the value of forgiveness as a child, I never felt like I really understood what that meant. What happens when one forgives? I was always so eager for the person I forgave to love me, I couldn’t hold anyone accountable for their choices. I just wanted everything to be okay, and I didn’t have the wherewithal to think of myself in that equation, of my own right to be okay, to approve of the way others treated me. I was convinced, at every step, that whoever seemed to love me would be the last person to actually do so. I had to hold on to the relationship no matter what.