by Nic Sheff
Zelda and I get into the car after a little bit and we drive past Sony Studios to the second-floor apartment Sam shares with her three roommates. When we walk in the front door, we’re immediately met by a potbellied, balding little man who introduces himself as Sam’s boyfriend. His name is Freddy.
“Sam’s in there,” he says, pointing to a closed door down the dark wooden hallway. “She doesn’t let me around when she’s using needles.”
So we go in and Sam is digging around her arm, looking for a vein, seated cross-legged on her bed. She’s very light-skinned and short with small rolls around her belly. She’s very welcoming to both of us. She lets me use her computer to check my e-mail and there’s a note from the father of a friend of mine in New York. I’d asked to borrow money and he has told me that he can’t help me as long as I’m using.
I’m crushed and kind of scared because we have no money left. Zelda and I have been selling clothes—books—CDs—anything—but that’s not gonna last and I know that. Still, I don’t mention the e-mail to Zelda. I choose to treat it like I treat everything these days—that if I just ignore stuff it’ll go away, or get better, or whatever. I’m already about to lose my cell phone through an inability to pay the bill and my car has been towed and I have no means of getting it because the storage fee is so high. Add that to the twenty-something parking tickets I have that are racking up penalty charges and the unpaid hospital and therapy bills and, well, you get an idea of how much I’ve already fucked everything up—and we’re only a couple months into our run.
These thoughts are quickly pushed aside, however, as Sam hands this huge bag of cocaine over to Zelda so we can make up some shots. We go into the bathroom.
“Is she just giving us all that coke?” I ask.
“I guess so. Sam’s a trust-fund kid.”
“Of course. How come everyone we know, besides us, has a fucking trust fund?”
“’Cause we live in L.A.”
“Right.”
Zelda insists on hitting me and making up my shot cause of all my convulsions. What she gives me is just perfect—head-banging without leaving me flopping like a fish on the floor. We go back out and sit around talking with Sam and Freddy, who’s been let back in the room. Sam’s dad is a sculptor who lives near Buenos Aires. Freddy is friends with all these people I knew in New York, so we talk about that stuff and music and books. We actually get on real well together and the girls go on the back porch together—I guess to shoot more coke.
We’ve been there about two hours when Zelda’s dad calls. I’m not sure why she answers, but she does. Immediately I hear her start screaming and I run out onto the porch. She’s yelling at her father in these shrill bursts and I’m actually kind of scared to go up to her.
“No! No, that’s fucking bullshit.”
“What?” I ask. “What?”
She hangs up the phone and then turns all her anger toward me.
“You! Your fucking mom called my dad to tell her we relapsed.”
“That bitch.”
“Jesus Christ,” she rants. “What are you, twelve? Your fucking mommy has to try and rescue you? Why doesn’t she just leave us the hell alone? Do you know what’s going to happen? Do you know how crazy my father is?”
I put my hand on her shoulder. “It’s gonna be all right.”
“Don’t touch me.” She howls that, pulling away, swinging back her arm as though she were going to hit me. I cringe back and she just starts going on and on about how she’ll never be able to forgive me for this. I try to remind her that we’ve been up for three days and that everything might seem better after we sleep. She doesn’t really hear anything I say. She screams until she can’t scream anymore and then she breaks down crying—collapsed on the splintering wooden deck.
Finally, she reaches her arms out to me and I bend down and hold her. She tells me she’s sorry. She tells me that over and over.
I apologize to Sam and Freddy when we get back in. They seem understanding, but Zelda and I decide to leave anyway, and we walk out into the afternoon sun. I’m starving and need some food so we get In-N-Out burgers and a couple of milkshakes. At this point we have no money left. Both our bank accounts are overdrawn. We asked our landlord if we could hold a garage sale out front of our apartment complex and he agreed to let us do it sometime early next month. Zelda rents a storage unit in the Valley where she has a lot of really valuable furniture and clothes and expensive prints of people like Neil Young, Jerry Garcia, and Duane Allman. We’re planning on going there this weekend. We’ve also contacted some guy Yakuza knows who’ll buy Zelda’s wedding band from her first husband and a Tiffany diamond ring she has. I feel really bad about Zelda having to sell all her stuff, but there’s just no other way.
On the way home Zelda reminds me that the needle exchange is open off Santa Monica Boulevard, so we turn left and head over to get some new needles and tourniquets. They have big cotton balls there too, but the last time I used their cotton a piece of it got drawn up in the needle and I ended up shooting it. When the bit of cotton fiber reached my brain it felt like someone smashed my head as hard as they could into the pavement. Then I started throwing up until Zelda could get a clean shot in me. I passed out for several hours after that.
The woman at the needle exchange remembers me and she fills in my drug of choice on her sheet without me having to say anything. She marks the crystal meth box and tells me I can have ten needles and two tourniquets. I get back in the car and Zelda is asleep, so I just drive around awhile listening to music. I wonder how my life has fallen apart again and how—AGAIN—I’ve lost everything. It was all going so well. I don’t know why the ground falls away underneath me so fast. I never even see it happening.
Or do I?
Either way, all I am aware of right now is a longing to just get home and stick a fresh needle in my vein with whatever drugs are left in our apartment. I pull our car into the parking space.
“Baby, we’re home,” I say, kissing Zelda’s forehead.
Her eyelids flicker open.
“Where?” she asks.
“Home.”
We get out and go up to the apartment.
DAY 577
Tomorrow’s the garage sale, so we drive early to Zelda’s storage unit. We managed to stay clean for two days after the fight we had at Sam’s. But then we sold some clothes at Wasteland on Melrose and we’ve been shooting cocaine and meth since last night. There was this halogen bulb in one of Zelda’s cosmetic mirrors that exploded in the middle of the night, right as she was getting into the shower. She couldn’t find the pieces anywhere, so she went ahead into the shower. She washed her hair and scrubbed over her body, while I was writing in a notebook on the bed. Pretty soon I heard her cursing and calling out for help. By the time I ran into the bathroom, Zelda was crying from the pain.
I guess what happened was the halogen bulb must have exploded into her hair. When she was washing her body she embedded the tiny pieces of glass all over her skin. Now you can see her legs and arms and face and chest covered in the splintered lightbulb.
We’ve just been digging the pieces out for the last seven hours. Zelda’s pretty good about it and we have the drugs to kill her pain—or at least, some of the pain. Still, now she’s bleeding all over and scabbed and everything. We actually decided to videotape some of our picking session in hopes of maybe suing the company that made the lightbulb and failed to put any warning label on the package. I mean, maybe it was a stupid idea, but there was no way of getting all the glass out. When you tried to pull out the shards they would break off into a thousand new pieces beneath the skin.
Zelda called her dad’s lawyers this morning about what happened, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t respond. I mean, they are her dad’s lawyers and her dad isn’t exactly happy with us right now.
Finally we get dressed, and even though Zelda still has tons of glass in her, we drive over the Hollywood Freeway to her storage unit. The sky is all brown haze
and black smog in the Valley. The light is dull and the heat is oppressive, but I still have to wear long-sleeved shirts ’cause my arms are so marked from needle tracks and the scar from my abscess.
The storage unit is deep in the Valley and it just keeps getting hotter the farther inland we drive. We pull in and Zelda enters her code to the gate. She has one of the bigger units on the lot. It’s ground-level, with a large corrugated metal door that she unlocks and we both struggle to push open. Inside, there are boxes upon boxes of clothes, lots of Moroccan furniture, some books, knickknacks, whatever.
I bring out a large couch and various benches and things. Zelda keeps telling me to slow down, but I just want to get through this as quickly as possible because so much of the stuff belonged to her ex-husband. There are old reels and posters and tons of photos. I feel really uncomfortable going through everything and I just have to keep moving so I don’t have to deal with it. I’m sweating and hot—moving almost spastically fast. I can’t stop. It’s gotten totally compulsive. It’s like I’m in psychosis or something—like I don’t really know what I’m doing. I empty the entire unit, pretty much, and then suddenly I pass out completely onto the asphalt. I start throwing up and Zelda tries to force-feed water down my throat. I take it in, but then keep choking up this bubbling foam.
I’m not sure what’s happening or why she’s pouring the water in my mouth. I crawl over to the couch I brought out and fall asleep—or pass out on it. Time passes.
I wake up to Zelda sticking me with a syringe and shooting me up with some coke. Zelda’s loaded up whatever she thinks we can sell at the garage sale but she needs me to help put the rest of the shit back in the storage unit. The sun is setting. I help her with the couch and this big mirror thing. That’s when I come out with it.
“Zelda, it would really mean a lot to me if you would throw that shit of your ex-husband’s away.”
She pauses. “I can’t. A lot of it belongs to his production company, and besides, that stuff was my life. I’m not gonna throw it away so you don’t have to be fucking jealous.”
That makes me angry, so I yell at her, saying, “You’re so stuck in your past! This place is like a fucking tomb.”
She bursts into tears at that. “Some of this was my mom’s stuff—stuff I’ve never even looked at. I can’t believe you don’t understand that.”
Of course I feel bad and I try to comfort her. “I’m sorry,” I say, softly now. “I just think it’s time to start moving on.”
“I know,” she says, after a while. “I will. Give it time, Nic. It’ll come. I know that with you, I’ll be able to start over. Be patient with me, please.”
“I will. I love you. It’s hard for me, you know? I get very jealous.”
“I get really jealous too,” she says.
I get into the front seat and kiss Zelda’s tears away, apologizing. We drive home and I’m still sick and exhausted. I’m concentration-camp skinny—everything all sunken in. We fall asleep early in bed, both loaded up on Seroquel. We’re supposed to get up, you know, really fucking early to set up for the garage sale.
I guess it’s around twelve when I hear Zelda screaming incoherently. I jerk awake, just as she starts digging her fingernails into the sides of my face. I try to push her off and she bites the bridge of my nose hard. She starts screaming about how she’s gonna call the fucking cops. I have to push her off again because she’s just flipping out and really hurting me. I’m scared and I don’t know what to do.
I run to the bathroom and slam the door, but she’s right behind me. I lock myself in and she pounds against it, saying she’ll call the cops if I don’t come out. I tell her she has to calm down before I do. She’s bashing against the bathroom door with something, trying to break it, and I keep pleading with her to stop. I’m not sure how long that goes on, but I’m cowering in the bathroom for a long time before I finally hear her slide to the ground, sobbing.
I open the door slowly and she’s collapsed there, crying and crying. I hold her and she starts apologizing, saying she didn’t know what she was doing. She’s really crying so hard. I kiss her forehead and hold her. She keeps asking if I’ll forgive her and, of course, I say yes. I love her, I tell her. We get back into bed and fall back asleep. I’m bleeding some from her fingernails.
DAY 578
We sleep all the next day—missing the garage sale entirely.
It’s around six when Zelda wakes me up and I’m pretty well fucked up from everything that happened yesterday. We have a small bit of cocaine left, so we shoot that and start trying to figure out what the hell we’re gonna do about money. It’s a pale gray outside—the hot sun almost set behind the polluted Los Angeles ocean. We eat some ice cream and Zelda calls Lisa. Lisa agrees to buy Zelda’s Duane Allman print for six hundred dollars—she says she’ll leave the check with Jordan if we go and drop the photo off. We get into the car after taking a shower together. I’m wearing these bell-bottom cords and one of Zelda’s ex-husband’s jackets that she designed. I feel weird about wearing his clothes—but whatever. Zelda drives down Sunset to Lisa and Jordan’s house up Mandeville Canyon. The road is crowded with traffic. We’re going around the turns at a stop-and-go pace.
Neither one of us mentions the way she flipped out last night, though my face still bears the scars.
It’s dark, dark by the time we pull into Jordan and Lisa’s driveway. Zelda brings in a full-length leather coat she hopes Lisa might buy. Jordan welcomes us. He looks the same as ever—long hair tied back, a little heavy, wearing a faded T-shirt. He’s super-sweet to us, offering us food. He’s impressed by the print and accepts the coat, saying he’ll try to talk Lisa into buying it. He asks me about what I’ve been doing. We just talk for a while. Eventually, I ask if he has any heroin we could smoke with him. He claims to be out.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean to assume.”
“No, no,” he says, in that sleepy voice of his. “You assumed correctly. I’m just out.”
He then takes us outside to see the new motorcycle he just bought. It’s a Ducati and he tells us how it’s the only thing that really makes him happy anymore. We look it over and act impressed. I actually really love riding motorcycles and have always wanted a racing bike like this.
“It just gives me so much pleasure,” he says. “Like nothing else.”
Zelda and I drive home. She’s managed to get me an interview tomorrow with the head of Flaunt magazine, so I know I really shouldn’t use speed tonight. Besides, we’re both out of money. But Zelda has a connection downtown that’ll front us some crack—if we want it. His name is Carlos and he deals off the street.
We head downtown and call him. He agrees to let us have eighty dollars’ worth of crack cocaine. We stop at a gas station and buy one of those flowers in the glass tubes that are basically only purchased for crack smoking. I know we shouldn’t be using anymore and that shit’s really falling apart, but the thought of not using now is basically unbearable.
We drive along a street downtown. Carlos reaches his arm through the window and hands over a very full Baggie of crack rocks. Zelda tells me he’s always had a crush on her, so that’s why he gives her such good deals. The guy is a scrawny little Hispanic kid, handsome, but strung-out-looking—maybe more than me.
We start smoking the crack on the way home and already I’m feeling better. I have to hold the wheel while she hits the pipe. The high is short-lived, but I guess that’s what we need, what with the interview and all. We go back to our apartment.
Our downstairs neighbor—this gay makeup artist from the South somewhere—gives us a very penetrating look like we’re just too disgusting for words as we walk into the courtyard. We go up past him, saying hello casually, and then we lock ourselves in our room. We smoke crack for a while and then make love.
We don’t sleep at all and as morning comes we’re still smoking crack and shooting the last of the cocaine. I do this complicated drawing and I tape it all up with string and pieces
of that computer I took apart. Zelda stands in the bathroom and picks at her skin for hours. I listen to music on my headphones. Eventually I pull Zelda out of her face-picking trance and we take a shower. I eat some Lucky Charms and we make coffee.
Before my interview with the Flaunt guy, I figure I should print out all my clips and writing samples at Kinko’s. Zelda and I drive down to the one on Sunset and we’re both about to go in, when Zelda decides to call Lisa and see if she’s interested in buying her leather trench coat. It’s actually raining a little—a muggy, dirty rain. The haze from the sky is just bleeding down on the stucco buildings along Sunset. I smoke a cigarette with the windows up and Zelda holds the phone, listening to it ring. I’m not sure who it is that answers, but Zelda keeps saying, “What?” over and over again—then, “Oh my God.” She hangs up and turns to me.
Jordan is dead. He crashed his motorcycle into a tree.
We stare at each other and then, at the same time, start crying all at once.
I’m actually bawling and I can’t stop. I’m not sure what to do. I call my friends in New York who knew Jordan so well, but no one answers any of the numbers. I call my dad and leave him a message. I figure maybe he can get in touch with Jordan’s mom—I know Jordan’s father died last year. Then I call my mom and she answers. I try to explain what happened, but before I can she is yelling at me—saying she knows I’m high.
“Mom, Jordan’s dead—what the hell are you talking about? I’m not high—I’m fucking flipping out. I thought you could get in touch with his mom, or something.”
“I’m not interested in Jordan, I’m interested in you. I haven’t heard from you in months and now you call me crying. What the hell is wrong with you?”
“Mom,” I say, curling my legs up to my chest on the front seat, “Jordan’s dead. I’m telling you, Jordan had a motorcycle accident and he’s fucking dead.”
“You’re high, aren’t you? I can tell by your voice. You need to get help. You’re throwing your life away with that woman.”