The next day, I hopped on a plane free of worry and left my parents to their own devices.
“It didn’t go well,” my dad told me a week later on the phone.
The evening after I’d left, despite crystal-clear warnings to the contrary, my dad decided to roll a joint as big as a Magic Marker and even convinced my mom to help him torch it. Neither of them had smoked in at least thirty years, so they carelessly consumed the reefer like back in the days when you needed to smoke a garbage bag full of the shit to get a tiny buzz. As my mom inhaled enough to give Willie Nelson a panic attack, my dad noticed the golf game he was watching on TV was the most beautiful thing ever created. “How wondrous man’s rule of nature is,” he thought, “that we can bend her will to make luxurious carpets and rolling hills. Who is dominating whom? Is it a battle or is there a symbiosis where both prosper?” As homo-sounding questions like that danced around in his head like sugarplums, my mom started to get pinhole vision. What the fuck were they thinking? Modern pot is just LSD in leaf form. You could probably die from it. “Jimmy, I can’t see,” my mom shrieked in a worried Scottish accent. “I cannee see a bloody thing!”
My dad wrenched his eyes from the television and told her to calm down. He explained that she was just very stoned and it would pass. He also encouraged her to inhale through her nose and breathe out her mouth, which she did. Unfortunately, that worked and her vision returned. “WHAT WAS THAT!?” she exclaimed, mortified by what she saw at the window. My dad was startled by her startle and walked over to the living room’s bay windows to see what she was talking about.
“There’s nothing there,” he assured her after looking at his front lawn. “What did you see, a raccoon maybe?”
My mother’s face was alabaster. “THERE IT IS AGAIN!” she wailed, pointing at a different window with nothing on the other side of it. As my dad peered out into the darkness, my mom shot up from the couch and ran upstairs. For the next fifteen minutes he heard stomping and slamming and clicking. She was locking every window and door in the house. Entrances were getting blocked and the house was almost completely secure. But from what?
“Jesus fucking Christ, Jimmy,” my mom yelled from the kitchen. “He’s staring at me!” My dad came into the kitchen to see his wife delirious with fear.
“What?” my dad asked, trying to calm her down. “What’s looking at you, an animal?”
My mother was now in tears. “It’s a creature,” she sobbed. “A goblin or something. It’s a tiny man. He’s a gremlin.”
“You mean a midget?” my dad asked, hoping she’d realize how ludicrous this notion was.
“No!” my mother said angrily. “He’s only a few inches tall. Wait, there’s more!”
At this point, my dad made a huge mistake. He threw up his hands and went back to the TV. She was ruining his groovy nature trip and he knew if he kept talking to her, he’d start bad-tripping too. “It’ll pass,” he said to her as he left the kitchen. “Just wait it out.” What he should have done is explain to her how irrational her fears were. “How many of these creatures exist?” he should have asked. “Are they taking over the entire planet at the same time or has this one tiny handful of monsters decided to focus all their attention on a retired teacher and an engineer who live on the outskirts of Ottawa?” I’ve done this with people who talk in their sleep and it usually snaps them out of it. When a tree-planting buddy named Jamie sleepwalked over to my tent one night, he told me a stampede of married women was chasing him. This was before Facebook, and after I explained how impossible that would be to coordinate, he said, “Oh yeah,” and went back to bed.
My dad enjoyed another ten minutes of lawns until he heard her talking to someone. He tried to ignore it at first but she was getting louder and it didn’t sound like “talking to yourself” talking. It sounded like “responding to questions” talking. Did the goblin get in? Was she talking him out of murdering her?
My dad walked over and put his ear against the kitchen door. “This might be funny,” he thought.
“Yes, McInnes. Yes,” she said while giving out her address, “he’s trying to kill me!”
This wasn’t what my dad was expecting, so he opened the door. Oh, no. Mom was on the phone.
“Who are you talking to?” my dad asked in one of those whisper-screams people do when they’re panicked but want to remain quiet.
“I called the police!” my mother replied, incensed. “You left me no choice.” My dad started pacing around the kitchen in terror and pulling out what was left of his hair while silently and frenetically making “Hang up the phone!” gestures at her.
Then my mom made things a whole lot worse. She said, “I’ve made a huge mistake—I’m sorry,” and hung up the phone. Shit! My dad knew the cops were on their way and he also knew the house reeked of hydroponic skunk weed. He ran to the living room, grabbed the couch cushions, and started fanatically trying to fan out the room. He was only able to do this for about a minute before a squad car screeched into the driveway and two cops began pounding on the front door. “Open up!” they yelled. “We know you’re in there!”
My mother was mortified. She dropped to her knees and put her hands on her face like the kid in Home Alone. “What have I done, Jimmy?” she pleaded. “What do we do now?” Things were so bad at this point it actually would have been best to tell the cops the whole thing was about tiny monsters—not that they would have believed her. Instead, my dad told her he’d handle it and went to the door. When he opened it and asked the officers if he could help them, they saw a drunken bastard who ruled his roost with an iron fist and regularly beat this poor, innocent woman. “We’d like to ask your wife a few questions,” they said to my dad.
“Helloooo!” my mom said like some best friends had popped by to play cribbage. The cops pushed past my dad and asked my mom, “Is there somewhere we can talk?” My dad’s heart sank as my mom escorted the two cops into the dining room before closing the door behind them. Like when Steve dropped into the huge pile of shit, the adrenaline had chased the high out of her system, and she was now more worried than baked.
He listened through the dining room doors as best he could but all he could hear was the tone of my mom pooh-poohing her domestic abuse and the two officers insisting they’d protect her. He heard quotes like, “Your husband isn’t the boss, we are,” and “There are places we can take you right now where you’d be safe.” If only they knew the person they were protecting her from was as small as he was and nonexistent. After another twenty minutes of questioning, the cops realized my mom wasn’t going to press charges and they gave up. God bless them by the way.
As they walked out of the dining room they stared at my dad like he was everything that’s wrong with this country. “Thank you, gentlemen,” my dad said to break the silence.
The cops ignored him and turned to my mom. “Remember, Mrs. McInnes,” they assured her, “we are always a phone call away. Whenever you’re ready.” My mom said thanks and closed the door. Then she put her back up against it and slid down to the floor with her head in her hands.
She hasn’t smoked pot since.
That’s What I Get for Teasing Junkies (2003)
I hate when magazines have an article about drugs and they use an obviously fake picture. Don’t show me a pile of sugar when you’re talking about cocaine. It makes you look like a nerd. So with a name like Vice, we weren’t about to use cinnamon and oregano to illustrate our cover story about heroin and pot.
I hired our editor TJ on the condition that he quit heroin. He did, but it wasn’t easy. For ten days his scrawny body writhed in pain because it no longer knew how to release dopamine. In heroin withdrawal, every nerve ending stings like a third-degree burn. Once he emerged from hell, he attended several weeks of nightly meetings and was finally ready to hold down a real job working for me.
I walked over to his desk, which was only a few feet from mine. Vice had an open floor plan but I made sure editorial was far away from marketing. I
wanted our writers to be as unhinged as possible. As old-timey journalist Theodore White once said, “When a reporter sits down at his typewriter, he’s nobody’s friend.” If editorial was happy, marketing was mad, and vice versa. That’s the way I liked it. It was a fifteen-hundred-square-foot warehouse space with about fifty people tapping away on keyboards and quietly talking on the phone to writers all over the world. TJ was spell-checking a piece while dressed in ratty jeans and a BMX shirt that said “FOX” in huge letters. He still resembled a junkie and his thin arms looked like Kermit the Frog’s. “I’ve got some bad news,” I told him.
“What?” he asked without looking away from his computer.
“I need you to buy some heroin.”
“WHAT?!” he blurted out while pushing away from his computer and turning to face me. Sweat droplets had begun to magically appear on his forehead.
“I need there to be real heroin in the photo,” I said, “and you’re the only guy I know who knows a guy.”
TJ looked around the room hoping to find another junkie. There was his other boss Suroosh, but all his connections had dried up well over a decade ago and even then, they were from Montreal. “Fine,” TJ said while angrily wheeling his chair back to his computer.
“When?” I asked.
TJ turned to me and exhaled an exasperated sigh. “Today, I guess?”
“I think now would be ideal,” I said.
TJ got on the phone and called a guy he used to call several times a day. This is someone he would yell at and cry to and sometimes fear. For years he was TJ’s archenemy and best friend simultaneously. They agreed to the drop-off spot and I rubbed my hands with excitement. An hour later, TJ and I were putting on our coats and heading outside. I’d done heroin before but I’d never seen a deal go down. “How does it work?” I asked, expecting a guy wearing a trench coat with a dozen syringes attached to the inside.
“I drop a hundred dollars in a phone booth then walk around the block,” he replied. I’m fucking cheap, so leaving that kind of money in a pay phone’s change hole felt like abandoning my baby in the middle of the road. I reluctantly gave him five twenties while asking why we couldn’t get a smaller amount. He told me we couldn’t, then walked over to the pay phone across the street. TJ pretended to make a call and stuffed the money into the hole. “We’re not walking around the block,” I said after he came back. “Let’s go hide in that store.” I watched the phone like a hawk and fifteen minutes later a nerdy Asian guy in a new ski jacket walked up to the phone and made the same pantomime phone call TJ did. “I hope that’s him,” I said to TJ, who nodded that it was.
After Chinese Downhill left, I trotted over to the phone and grabbed the bundle. It was ten tiny plastic bags of beige powder. They were wrapped with wax paper and stamped with a skull and crossbones. Dealers like branding their product as much as any small business owner and want you to know exactly who it was that got you so high. Suroosh told me that whenever he heard someone OD’d, he and his junkie friends would run over to the guy’s house hoping to find out what brand the guy was doing, because it must be some really good shit.
I hurried back to the office completely ignoring TJ and when I walked through the front doors I yelled, “Who wants heroin?” to the whole office while holding up the bags. For nonaddicts like myself, heroin is just some stupid powder that kills sad people. For recovering addicts it is an omnipresent force that haunts their dreams and is constantly floating through their minds. Suroosh hadn’t gone near any drug or booze for a decade, but he still had to attend meetings regularly and told me about frequent nightmares. “Hey, man,” I said, walking over to him with all ten bags, “you love this shit, right?”
Suroosh pushed away from his desk the same way TJ had. “Is that real?” he asked like I was holding the three-inch-tall goblin that tried to kill my mother. TJ had walked in behind me and was nodding. They both stared at it with scared smiles. Then they said, “Holy shit,” at almost exactly the same time. I looked at my watch and realized it was time to take this to the next level.
“So it’s valuable to you guys, right?” I said as I tore open a bag and let it slowly sprinkle to the dirty floor. For years they’d been trained to worship every granule of this stuff, so their Pavlovian instinct was to yell, “No!” and try to stop it from falling. As they clamored to protect it, I spread the powder all over the floor with my shoe while saying, “Oooopsie!” Then I danced around like an asshole holding the other nine bags and singing, “I have heroin! I have her-o-in!” TJ and Suroosh couldn’t wrench their eyes from the floor.
I pulled out a key, dipped it into the bag, and scooped out a bump. “Come on, guys,” I said, holding the key to their noses, “just one sniff.” Again with the “holy shit.” Can’t junkies come up with anything better than “holy shit”? Before I knew what I was doing, I had snorted the heroin up into my own stupid head, which destroyed TJ and Suroosh. I basically had shoved a cross in Jesus’s face and said, “Remember this?”
They staggered back to their desks and tried to get on with their day and I laughed at them and … wait a minute … why am I wearing an anvil for a hat? Why is my face itchy? Why do I feel like I’m going to barf? I mumbled something to our secretary about making sure nobody touched those bags—especially TJ and Suroosh—and walked in slow motion to the bathroom, where I barfed so violently, I was worried the toilet would split in two. It didn’t feel bad, though. It felt like taking a big shit out of my mouth.
I wobbled out of the bathroom and spent the next two hours doing the two-minute job of snapping one picture of the heroin before flushing it down the toilet forever. I had only done a bump the size of a pencil tip, but I felt like I drank a salad bowl of vodka. “I gotta go home,” I said like a sleepwalking Orson Welles, and TJ nodded while shaking his head.
When I got outside, the entire city was underwater. Everyone was speaking backward and the sidewalk was moving. I was only a few blocks from the train but I might as well have been stranded on the top of Mount Everest. Then Blobs called. “You ready?” she asked in the perky tone of someone who wasn’t on heroin.
“Whuuu?” I replied like a talking snail.
“For dinner—we gotta go meet David. Did you already forget? Jesus.” She said a bunch of other stuff, but people talk fast when you’re on heroin and I was still trying to wrap my snail antennae around the first part.
I had recently started hanging out with comedian David Cross and didn’t want to risk our delicate new friendship by blowing off some dinner plans he had made weeks ago. David is so into barbecue, he has a tattoo of a pig who just ripped his own ribs out and is handing them to you on a platter. The dinner was at a popular soul-food place in Chelsea called Maroons and I was already late. I ran down the stairs before realizing I wasn’t running at all but barely walking, so I stumbled back up and called a car service. It showed up almost immediately and after mumbling the address to the driver, I slumped into the backseat and fell asleep with my eyes open. It was like being in a music video made for dead people. When we crossed the Williamsburg Bridge I looked at the Manhattan skyline with the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building standing above their peers like steel gods and thought, “That’s nice.” As we drove through the East Village and passed ratty dope dealers and Puerto Ricans on their third generation of welfare I thought, “That’s nice.” As we crossed town on Fourteenth Street and passed methadone clinics, I remembered the thousands of junkies who had already died in this town and thought, “That’s nice,” and I was there. I was relieved to see Blobs standing outside because the only way my driver was going to get paid was if I could spit out the words “Please pay him” as I handed her my wallet.
David was inside dealing with the table and before I could greet him he said, “What the fuck is the matter with you?” I had no idea I was doing anything unusual but Blobs told me later I was standing like an ape with bended knees and my knuckles dragging on the floor. I tried to get it together and snap out of it but fu
ck, man, the air was made of transparent licorice. How’s a guy supposed to move around in that? Getting to our table was a huge imposition, and Blobs had to order for me as well as handle all the conversating.
I couldn’t believe how fucking fried I was and there were no signs of its wearing off. When you do cocaine, you’re high for ten minutes and then things go back to normal. This was more like changing into a different life-form. It didn’t add a little spice to the evening. It swallowed the entire evening like a gigantic bullfrog.
When our meals arrived, Blobs and David were thrilled. Apparently fried chicken is delicious or something but I might as well have been gawking at a sweater knitted to look like a meal. I didn’t want to put anything down my throat besides my finger, which reminded my stomach that it was again time to hurl. “Excuse me,” I stammered while heading toward the bathroom. I could feel barf walking up my throat and I almost knocked over a table near the bathroom door as I threw the door open and dropped to my knees. The restaurant was very small and this tiny bathroom was a few inches from the nearest couple. A waiter politely closed my door and an earsplitting vomit geyser came hurling out of my guts, splashing against the bowl. Before I could inhale some oxygen and recover, another pile of vomit roared out of my face. I couldn’t stop. After a half dozen monster pukes, I rolled off the toilet and let my face enjoy the cold tile floor. I was lying in the piss of a thousand New Yorkers and it felt great—so great, it was putting me to sleep. As I dozed off, I wondered how many meals were ruined by my 120-decibel barf concert.
When I came to, I crawled up the wall and tried to steady myself. I opened the bathroom door and apologized to the couple who was inexplicably still sitting there. Apparently some time had passed because the check was paid for and my meal was waiting in a doggie bag. Blobs was not impressed and David was laughing and shaking his head. “You are a piece of work,” he said, handing me my food. I tried to think of a witty comeback but all that came out was, “That’s nice.”
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