The Big Fix

by Tracey Helton Mitchell

  I would see that look again. I would see it in the face of a rapist, hopeless addicts, and abusive boyfriends. It was a look that I had never seen growing up in suburban Ohio. This look was one of terror. It was my face reflected in his eyes—I say “reflected” because when he looked at me, I saw nothing but a frenzied stare. No emotion but anger, all of it directed at me.

  “If I don’t find this money, I am going to kill you, bitch,” he told me.

  He pushed the scissors toward my face again.

  “In fact, I am not going to kill you,” he continued. He was so angry spit was starting to come out of his mouth.

  “I am going to put your eyes out so you have to live the rest of your life this way.” I believed him. In my gut I knew these were facts he was giving me, not idle threats.

  As he tore apart every inch of my apartment, I sat frozen. He explained to me that these were the type of people who would not forgive him for not having the money. He dragged me around the city in the dark, fruitlessly trying to find my houseguest. It wasn’t the fact that it was my houseguest who had stolen this man’s money. What mattered to me was that he didn’t believe me. When he finally decided to abandon me, I formulated an idea about how to get enough money to escape the city. It would take a few days. I would have my college tuition check refunded to me. It was break time between quarters. It would take a while before my parents would realize what had happened. I had to find some way to fix the situation. More importantly, I had to find a way to get out of his reach—NOW. There was once a time when I was innocent, when I believed the world was a good place full of good people. That time was over.

  Within a few days, I was on a Greyhound with $900 and no idea what I was going to do with myself. I just knew that I had to get away from immediate danger.

  In my mind, there were two junkie choices: New York and San Francisco. If I was going to take a “vacation,” I certainly wanted it to involve drugs. The incident in my apartment had me looking over my shoulder in fear for my life. I needed an escape. I needed it now. I certainly intended to return when things calmed down. How long would it take this person to realize I didn’t take his money? If I was going to hide out for a few weeks, I figured I might as well enjoy my time. Hell, I thought, I might even be able to bring back a few bags and double my money. People I knew did this all the time. I could get back the $900 and go back to school. The plan was slowly taking shape. I knew people in both SF and NYC, places I was sure I could get heroin. New York didn’t seem that appealing. I had been there in 1988 with a few friends. We had slept in our car at Tompkins Square Park. We drank blackberry-flavored brandy to stay warm in the cold city air. That was the first time I saw a dead person on the street. His body was blocking my path. I asked my friend, “What do I do?” He said, “This is New York, step over him.” We had gotten loaded on something or other, but I never got the hang of navigating the dope spots. I decided I would try my hand at San Francisco. The warm California sun would do wonders for my mood while I worked to straighten out my life back in Cincinnati.

  I contacted a friend from high school. He was attending the University of San Francisco. He agreed to let me stay in his dorm for a few days. Unfortunately for that relationship, I was a train wreck from day one. All I could think was, Where can I get some drugs? I was on a mission, as I called it. I knew that if I could find Jeremy, I would be able to get high. I had heard he had advanced to harder drugs. Plus, I trusted him. Either way, I had to find something. My money was burning a hole through my pocket.

  Up until this point, I had used drugs but never had easy access to them. The seasoned junkies I met out at the bars who were traveling through the city used to snicker at me. They told me I was the “kind of person that had a job.” I wasn’t a hustler. I would learn later I was the type of person who was known as a “mark,” because I was completely naïve about the ways of the drug world. In Ohio, I went to school or worked or both. San Francisco would become a total departure from everything I knew of life. When I left my hometown, I cut myself off from my support system, both emotionally and financially. No longer could I turn to trusted friends or my parents. I had to find my own way as I waded waist-high through the gutter of human garbage. It became perfectly normal to have no job and no place to live, and to use drugs outside.

  When I was a teenager, I used to listen to the band Fang. They would sing songs about the Tenderloin district in San Francisco. Those songs spoke to me. They made me feel as if being a junkie was the ultimate act of rebellion. Everything I had hated about my life was in the lyrics. The isolation, the depression, and the feeling of not belonging anywhere in society. I had seen both my parents work hard their entire lives to obtain financial gains, yet they never seemed happy. Maybe the solution to happiness came with not caring what others thought about me. It sounded like everything I wanted from life. I wanted that feeling of complete freedom and not giving a fuck about anything. I had always worried about my weight, my grades, and my parents, why other kids tormented me. My life had been filled with so many expectations. Be a good girl. Get good grades. Ignore the fact that my father is drunk. Don’t tell anyone what goes on in this house. Keep everything inside. Smile—what do you have to cry about? I was reminded that I had everything—everything—except I wanted to kill myself and I didn’t know why. My ex-boyfriend had told me I was worthless. Maybe he was right. For now, I wanted to be relieved of my burdens.

  On the way to my friend’s dorm from the Greyhound station, the cab driver pointed out the window: “This is the Tenderloin. Do not come here.” That moment will always be cemented in my memory. That was the day when I found everything I thought I wanted in one place. I had a return-trip ticket to Cincinnati in my bag. But I never made it back. My life was now in San Francisco.

  I stepped onto the bus that very first night after dropping off my things at my friend’s dorm. “Can you tell me which bus will take me downtown?” I asked the driver. “I need the Tenderloin.”

  I felt instantly overstimulated by the insanity of my new environment. It was complete chaos. In Ohio I had never seen people use drugs out in the open, with the few exceptions being when I stole quick glances from the bus while going past the housing projects. In the Tenderloin, drugs were everywhere. There was crack on one street, people high on meth on another. There were hookers walking the streets in the middle of the day—men, women, trans folk, and many who looked well under the age of consent. I was in awe of the fact that I could buy needles on the street corners for $2. There was even a place I could exchange them for clean ones, a program that was completely absent in Ohio. People slept anywhere and everywhere on the street. AIDS was in full swing. I had never met anyone with the virus in Cincinnati. Now, it seemed as if the signs and faces of the epidemic were everywhere. It seemed like everyone had a cane or an oxygen tank. I was smart enough to be afraid and naïve enough to push forward anyway.

  Within days, I was full of so many different kinds of drugs. I didn’t find Jeremy right away, but I found ten other people just like him. Eager young men in need of money and a chick to hang out with them. Within a few days my friend asked me politely to leave. I certainly didn’t blame him. The second night I was in the city, I was returned to his room by strangers. I had passed out in the center of town. I was slumped against a stop sign when some Good Samaritans graciously offered to transport me back to the dorms. “Where do you live?” they asked. “Ohio” was my reply. A new acquaintance thought he was helping me out when he gave me a Klonopin mixed with some other kind of medication to chase the heroin. I had $800 tucked in my sweaty bra.

  In the first month I was in the city, I found the heroin, Xanax, crystal methamphetamine, cheap alcohol, and crack cocaine. It did not take long to burn through what money I had on drugs and hotel rooms. When I had brief moments of consciousness, I would think about my mother. I knew she would be expecting her Sunday phone call. But I could not pick up the phone. I was too ashamed. The truth was too hard to explain. I had abando
ned school to live on the streets of a strange city. But I had no shortage of excuses. She would be better off without me. It was painful for me to think of how I must be hurting her. I couldn’t bear to hear her voice. She would never understand. How could she? I barely understood myself. I eventually called anyway. At first I told her I was on vacation. Then I said I was looking into a new school. At some point along the way, I simply stopped calling. She had to find out from my landlord that I was not coming home. I thought it might be better for everyone involved if I just disappeared. I did—I disappeared into a chemical coma. I felt brief moments of happiness. Most of all, I felt numb. That was what I thought I needed.

  I made friends quickly, other kids who had left their homes to escape to the city. Many of them were fleeing abusive parents. Some of them had come out as gay, lesbian, or transgender, only to be kicked out into the streets. We would huddle together on Market Street sharing beers while swapping stories about the places we wanted to see across the U.S. Every week, it seemed like there was a new group of people. It was easy at first, sleeping in little groups on the street or in abandoned buildings. The money for hotels was long gone. For $20, I could pull together enough drugs or alcohol to satisfy my tiny habit. But that honeymoon phase didn’t last long. The romance of being on the road soured as my habit increased. I had never been exposed to heroin long enough to know how quickly it takes hold of a person. It was as if one day I woke up with an unquenchable thirst, and the only thing that satisfied me was that drug.

  I had to find ways to support a growing habit.

  I ran into Jeremy one afternoon when I was sick with the beginning of a withdrawal. He told me he would fix me up at “his” apartment. I don’t know why I actually believed for a second that it was his. He was living with a blue-haired stripper. She was taking care of all the bills while he made a few dollars here and there facilitating minor drug deals. He seemed genuinely happy to see me, though troubled.

  As he cooked up the drugs, he nearly burned a hole in his leather pants. He looked like he had stepped out of London in the late ’70s with his perfect English punk attire. He seemed slightly out of place on that hot day. He didn’t have a shirt on, and I could see the scars from where he had been cutting himself again.

  “Why are you here?” he asked me.

  Because . . . I didn’t know anymore.

  I held my syringe in my hand as he did his issue. He had given me a clean one, a new one in fact. I was embarrassed to admit I didn’t know how to inject myself. Over a year of IV use and I still hadn’t learned. It had never been hard to find someone to inject me, as long as I was willing to share. I had always been afraid of needles (once when I needed a vaccination it had taken five medical staff people to hold down my hysterical body). Now here I was, blindly holding out my arm to be injected with this strange drug known as black tar heroin.

  He turned to me as the drugs hit him. He could see I needed him to inject me. This was such a strange scene. I thought I had tried to save him once. Now he was helping me. He had everything while I was out on the street.

  “You can’t hit yourself?” he said. He shook his head in disbelief as he grabbed a shoelace to wrap around my arm.

  “Get out,” he told me. “Get out of this city. Go back home. Forget this place.”

  I laughed to myself. What did he know? He had been here only a few months longer than I had. Everything had seemed fine so far. I felt like I was on an extended vacation.

  The great adventure came to a screeching halt when I realized soon after that I was strung out. For years before that, I had truly believed that being strung out was all psychological. I remember remarking on how weak-minded someone must be to get dependent on some little substance. It is different when you are the one who is strung out. I got to experience that pain firsthand. This wasn’t just the “junkie flu.” This was an all-encompassing feeling that took over my body, my mind, and my soul. We used to have a saying: “Are you dedicated to the cause?” Except this wasn’t religion or politics—this was something far more serious. You could separate the casual user from what we called a “dope fiend” by the things one was willing to do to get money for drugs. When I became strung out, I was dedicated to the cause. I was willing to go to any length to keep from feeling that terrible sensation that came with withdrawal. The twitching legs, the snot dripping from my nose, the feeling of desperation. Heroin became the love of my life. I would do anything to be together just one more time.

  “Fuck, I’m getting sick,” one of my new friends told me.

  She was a young woman who had just left her house in Marin. She told me she was twenty-one, but I suspected she was younger. Eighteen? Nineteen? I found out later she was just out of high school. She had started mixing with the “wrong crowd” during her senior year. We were thrown together through a mixture of poor choices and desperation. I had been educated by a few more seasoned female users while we sat around and waited for the dope man. They would explain that a young woman alone in the city was not safe if she chose to use drugs. One of a few things would happen. She would overdose, only to be put out on the sidewalk. She would end up stripping. She would be supporting not just her own habit but also that of her “musician” boyfriend. He’d call himself a musician—all his equipment went to the pawn shop long, long ago. Finally, a young woman might get “turned out” by a pimp to prostitution. Men see women as dollar signs. There is an untapped gold mine in her pants. Everyone wants a piece of women like us. Those more experienced women learned the hard way; they were trying to impart their wisdom. I listened to the best of my ability. I got with my new friend so we could pool our money, but now this relationship was about to come to an end.

  She was complaining about being sick. I hated to see her like this. As much as I didn’t want to admit it, I had developed some feelings for her. I had a crush on this girl. She liked me, too. I could never be myself in Ohio; my being attracted to women would have been too much for my conservative community. Our relationship wasn’t based on sex—it was emotional in nature. This was the first time I had felt as if someone liked me for more than just what I had in my pants. She made me feel like I was okay just the way I was. She liked to read books to me and tell me her deepest secrets. She told me she left because her stepfather had been molesting her since she was thirteen. She finally got up the courage to leave the house after her mother refused to believe her. I admired her strength. A boyfriend got her started on drugs, then left her for better opportunities. She had no street smarts, no experience. In reality, neither did I. I was just a few months ahead of her in this life.

  I started to think of things we could do for money.

  “Well, let’s go up to Larkin and O’Farrell,” I suggested.

  Larkin and O’Farrell is an intersection near a center that helps homeless youth, which means that corner attracts a special type of predator, the type looking for young women. I had been stopped there many times by men looking for sex. Before we could even agree on an amount, they always wanted to know my age. Apparently I looked sixteen, because I walked away with cash a few times.

  I never thought I would have sex with anyone for money. Heroin made it so easy. It asked me how this was any different from the random hookups in bars I used to have. This time, it told me, I could get paid for it. My newfound friends agreed. Junkies on the street had the perfect guy for me that first time. He was safe. He told me I was a goddess. The next time was easier. I was stupid to sell myself short. No one had really wanted me all my life. Now men nearly ran their cars off the road to spend time with me. It seemed to make sense. I was a feminist. It was my body, my choice. I was unable to see that the drugs were making all the choices for me.

  I continued. “Maybe we can catch one of those kids with money going to the youth center. If not, we can do a quick date and meet back here.”

  Her silence told me everything.

  “No.” She shook her head at me.

  Here was the difference between a casual
user and where I was in life. She was willing to sit around in withdrawal until easy money or drugs came her way. She didn’t understand. I didn’t want her to. Part of me was wishing I could be like her. Two cute young women could sometimes get gifts from strangers—seemingly with no expectations for sex in return. In reality there was a “system” with the unspoken rule that all debts would eventually be collected. No one around here got anything for free. We all paid one way or another. But my heroin habit was pushing me past the point of waiting for a free gift to come along. The eight-hundred-pound gorilla on my back needed to be fed.

  I started to raise my voice. “While you are willing to scrounge money for drugs, looking for change in a couch to support a $5 habit, I need some REAL money. I am supporting a $30- to $50-a-day habit.” She could not understand the things I was willing to do. I was glad she couldn’t. Maybe she wouldn’t end up like me.

  The party ended for me when I traded my stability for my next fix.

  I tried to explain to her, “If you aren’t making money, you are walking around sick. No one is helping you. It is just us.”

  She shook her head at me again.

  One of the older junkies had told me early on, “You better be shoplifting, selling your ass, or working the hell out of anyone that crosses your path. Or all of these things. You are getting your teeth pulled for pain meds to sell. You are living on the street. You are alone in the world.”

  My girl was not willing to do any of these things. I was proud of her for this. I envied her ability to say no, but I knew this would be the end of our friendship. A few days later, I put her on the bus to stay with a relative in Michigan. She made it out alive. Years later, she sent me letters thanking me for taking care of her. I cried when I saw them. She had contacted my mother for my address.

  “Who is this person?” my mother asked me.

  “A friend,” I told her.