by Sam Lansky
The day after I went home from the hospital, I went to see Dr. Chester to talk to him about what had happened. I had bandages on my face.
“Maybe we should try putting you on Neurontin,” he said.
If I wasn’t scared straight, at the very least I was rattled—deeply. I decided to stop drinking, at least for a little while, although I wasn’t sure I was ready to give up the pills.
Daphne’s father had been sober for over two decades. I met him at his office in midtown and told him, in brief, what had happened. He shook his head. He didn’t seem shocked or surprised to hear my war stories, but he offered to take me to a twelve-step meeting.
And so I went with him, down to a converted brownstone in the West Village that now served as a clubhouse. It was a funny mix of people: glitterati in heels, grizzled old men who looked (and smelled) homeless, white-collar commuters, and a drag queen named Brownie who pushed my face into her décolletage.
“Welcome home, baby,” she said.
It didn’t feel like home: it felt like an anthropological experiment. I was too young to be doing this, I thought—too young to be seriously getting sober. I was supposed to go to college. There were far too many things that I had yet to do.
I went a few times, but after the meeting one night, I took the train up to Ronan’s house. He was sitting on the fire escape, smoking a joint. I took a hit and exhaled.
“Yo—I don’t know if, like, going to meetings is for me,” I said. “Part of me thinks that maybe this was all just a big overreaction—so I went too hard and ended up in the hospital. It happens, right?”
The truth was, I missed drinking. I’d thought that I could get by on just pills, but there was nothing that produced quite the same marvelous effect in me that alcohol did: that fizzy, loose liberty.
“Maybe you aren’t an alcoholic, Sam,” he said. “Maybe you’re just kind of messed up.”
“You really think so?” I said, trying not to sound too eager.
“Yeah, man,” he said. “Like, you’re fine. So you took a few too many pills and fucked up your face. That doesn’t mean you have to stop drinking for the rest of your life.”
He was right, I thought. I had gone way overboard.
“Give me a beer,” I said. He opened the minifridge in his bedroom and handed one to me. I cracked it open. I didn’t even like beer, but nothing had ever tasted quite so sweet.
Senior prom was a week after the overdose. I almost skipped it—it felt like an odd way to punctuate the end of my high school experience—but decided at the last minute to go.
The night was balmy, the streets crashing with taxis. Pedestrians muttered on sidewalks. All the lights were on in midtown, blinking jumbotrons with video screens flashing logos, graphics, cleavage.
The event was at an upscale restaurant downtown. On the glassy dance floor, I stared at the swirling rainbow of couture dresses and dark suits. I drank champagne in the bathroom, waking up once it was in my body, vitalized again.
“I can’t believe this is the end,” I said to Daphne. “I can’t believe it’s over.”
At eleven thirty, we left the dance and took a cab up to the Waldorf, where the seniors had split the cost of a penthouse suite. I smoked a joint on one of the many-tiered terraces. Gangster rap, spitting gutturally, lurched from the speakers inside. In the master bathroom, I could hear laughter; a trio of girls had filled the tub with bubbles and jumped inside, their bodies glistening.
I was sitting on a floral-printed chaise, talking with Daphne, when I heard a scream—alarming and constant and wrenching, ululating as a tribal song. It pulled me into its eye.
In the hallway, there were three boys, tanned and muscled, their fists flailing. There was a boy beneath them—he was a little odd; I wasn’t friends with him—and he was writhing, delirious with pain. They were hitting him, and blood was everywhere, dripping from him, puddling below his nose and into his ears. They beat him mercilessly as he screamed and wailed. The noise was piercing, like the screeching of feedback over a loudspeaker. The scream spurted blood all over the white carpet. They were winning, fueled by cocaine and adrenaline and bravado, I figured, but there wasn’t really any fight to win. The kid was choking, his tongue lolling uselessly in his mouth, his eyes slitted into wrinkled indentions. He opened them to see everyone watching. Then the scream turned into a kind of muted gagging.
“I need a drink,” I said. I turned away. Later, I heard they had accused him of stealing their drugs, though it wasn’t clear whether he actually had, not that it would have made a difference.
I called Kat that night. “Maybe it’s good that I’m coming back to Portland for the summer,” I said.
“Why?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Too many beautiful people doing too many ugly things.”
I could practically hear Kat rolling her eyes through the phone.
“That sounds like something you would say,” she said.
The graduation ceremony was a few days later, in a ballroom at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I was wearing a trim black suit under my robe. All the other graduates looked so happy with their families—so normal. It made the day feel slightly sinister, weighty with portent.
My mother flew out for the occasion. It was the first time she had met any of my New York friends.
“Your life here is so different,” she said.
“You don’t know the half of it,” I said.
Six
They appeared in the night, as in a dream. Two men shadowed in beams of charcoal half-light. They stood in the doorway of my bedroom, dark-skinned and hulking, impassive as sculpture. They didn’t speak, but their presence was as rattling as a shot of adrenaline. I jolted awake in a snarl of knotted linens. Perspiration stung on my brow. I licked my lips. My tongue felt useless, like it didn’t belong in my mouth.
As my eyes began to adjust, I looked stupidly at the men, and they looked back at me.
It seemed like only minutes before that I’d stumbled out of a packed nightclub in a coruscating blur of neon lights, cigarette smoke unfurling in the air, the taxicab sprawl, my doorman leering, the slickened walnut panels of the elevator spinning around me, a clumsy face-first collapse into bed. I could still taste the evening’s vodka-tonics, feel the sticky hubris of lip gloss tingling on my cheekbone. That telltale clenching in my jaw from the two tabs of Ecstasy that I’d taken shortly before midnight with Sahara. She was just a few blocks away, across the park.
I should call her, I thought idly. I wonder if she’s tripping out, too.
One of the men snapped his fingers, jerking me into alertness. I had dozed off.
I looked at them, trying to will them into nothingness. Then I glanced at the clock. It was half past four. I moaned. The men were still standing there. I was awake, suddenly. Acutely awake.
“You should pack a bag,” one of the men finally said. His face was inscrutable. Was I being kidnapped? A frisson of anticipation scaled my spine. Kidnapped. It was so glamorous.
“Where are you taking me?” I asked. “Who are you? Where’s my father?”
My father.
I sat up in bed and I could see his silhouette in the hallway. He was quaking, his face buried in his hands.
“Daddy?” I said. He disappeared into the dusky light of the corridor and I focused back on the two men.
“Where are you taking me?” I repeated.
“Rehab,” the other man said.
“Rehab?” I said. My voice cracked. “Oh no. This is a mistake.”
“It’s not,” he said.
“Where?”
“Aspen,” one of them said.
“Aspen,” I said. “Oh. Great.”
I let my imagination project me into a ski lodge. I would be nestled in an overstuffed armchair before a fire, its flame crackling. I would be sipping from a mug of peppermint cocoa, wearing a chunky-knit argyle turtleneck and suede snow boots. I’d talk about my feelings and then maybe hit the
slopes in a fur-trimmed parka and oversize sunglasses. Aspen would be okay.
“Get your things,” one of them said, brandishing a tan canvas duffel at me. It had come from my father’s closet, I knew. The realization that he’d planned this suddenly dawned upon me. I lurched to my feet and tossed a few essentials into the bag: my laptop, a diaphanous cashmere sweater, facial moisturizer, a fistful of jewelry. The drugs left shimmering trails on my bare feet as I shuffled into a pair of leather bedroom slippers.
I heard a gust of laughter. I looked up at one of the men.
“What are you packing?” he said.
I eyed him warily.
“You’re going to the wilderness,” he said.
What?
“You said I was going to Aspen,” I countered, arms akimbo. I studied the contents of my unzipped bag. I had been so pragmatic.
“Aspen,” he said. “Aspen is the name of the program. Wilderness rehab. In Utah.”
Panic prickled in my scalp, then corkscrewed down through my fingertips. My father materialized in the doorway.
“Sam,” he said, “go with them.”
“Shit,” I said. “Shit.” Then, with gusto: “Shit shit shit.”
I began to cry, momentarily deafened by a ringing in my ears. Feebly, I punched a pillow.
Could I escape? As I straightened my back to my full height, tears gushing down my face, I realized that the men dwarfed me: I was six feet small. A ripple of muscle poked from the sleeve of one of them; he tensed. A getaway attempt was futile.
“You better not try and run,” he said, working some eerie telepathy.
“I won’t,” I said. I meant it. He motioned me out of my room and I limped forward into the kitchen.
At the front door, my father put a hand on my shoulder, then pulled me into a hug. I allowed my arms to dangle limply at my sides for a moment; then I pulled away.
He would pay for this later.
“Don’t fucking touch me,” I spat. His beard was wet with tears.
Through the hallway, in the elevator, down through the lobby. The night doorman raised a hand in greeting and opened the doors to the front vestibule for my unlikely entourage. He was the one who had always looked at me funny when I stumbled in half drunk at midnight on a school night, again when I left at one thirty to go pick up drugs, stranger still when I returned reeking of smoke at four, and most strangely when I left for school at six in the morning, no trace of slumber clouding my eyes.
On the street, the sun was rising over the brownstones on Eighty-eighth Street, and I raised my hand to my eyes, blinded by the starkness of the morning. Croissants cooked in the patisserie beneath my building. A taxi purred past in a yellow blur. I tried to suck in as much of that smoky morning air as possible.
More than anything, I did not want to leave New York.
I could not leave New York.
I called Seth on the way to the airport. I was hysterical.
“They’re taking me to wilderness,” I cried. “Some program called Aspen.”
I heard a heavy sigh on the other end of the phone. “Okay,” he said. “You’re gonna be fine. It’ll be tough, but you can get through it. And you will.”
“I don’t think I can do it,” I said.
“This is the best advice I can give you,” he said. “Keep your head up, but keep your head down.”
At the airport, I sat dumbly at the gate, flanked on either side by the two men. There was a bluebird hopping along the floor of the terminal, dodging the wheels of rolling suitcases slapped across the tile by fat tourists.
You don’t belong here any more than I do, I thought.
I slept on the plane to Salt Lake City, awakening to one of the men nudging me to life. I couldn’t remember where I was—and then it came rushing back to me. A swirl of terminals and shuttle buses.
In the bathroom at the airport, I sneaked the emergency Adderall that was tucked into my wallet. They rented another car and we drove on the freeway. I felt peppier. Everything is going to be okay.
At a convenience store, I bought a tabloid and a bottle of water. I smoked a cigarette while one of them stood beside me. His name was Tim, he had said.
“That’s going to be your last one,” he said.
“I’ll enjoy it, then,” I said.
I took in the sights and sounds of this unfamiliar terrain—the low scrub of the suburban landscape. Where was I? Surely they wouldn’t actually take away my cigarettes—that would be inhumane. Dean used to say that I didn’t seem like I could be me without smoking. “You’d be much less profound if you didn’t smoke,” he’d say, reaching for a drag. “You’re always enwrapped in a cloud of smoke. Literally, or metaphorically.”
“You hungry?” one of them asked.
“No,” I lied.
After about an hour on the road, we turned onto a cul-de-sac spotted with small, ranch-style tract homes. A white van was parked in front of one; Tim pulled up behind it.
“Out,” he said.
They led me inside. A cluster of teenage boys, all of whom looked as haggard as I did, sat on a faded sectional, watching a movie. One of them raised a hand in greeting, while the others looked forward at the television. I turned to Tim.
“This isn’t what I was picturing,” I said.
“This is the safe house,” Tim said. “Your program isn’t ready to admit you yet, so you’ll be here a few days.”
He took my duffel bag. “Tell us if you need a change of clothes,” he said.
“I don’t,” I said. “But I need my pills. Do you have my pills? I haven’t taken my Lexapro today.” Privately, I was more concerned about the Xanax—that would certainly take the edge off this experience.
“You’re not going to get any pills until you get to Aspen and see a doctor,” he said. “We can’t dispense them.”
I sputtered. They might as well have told me that I’d be going the next two days without air.
“That’s unacceptable,” I said firmly.
“Kid,” he said. “We’re not giving you any drugs.”
“I’m not asking you for black tar heroin,” I said. “I’m asking you for my psychiatrically necessitated medication. You don’t have to go cop for me. I brought my pills. Give them to me. Now.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t help you.” He turned to leave, but I grabbed his arm.
“Let me explain something to you,” I said. “I take benzos for anxiety. I’ve been taking them for months. Now, you probably don’t know this because you’re, like, an inbred fuck, but there are only two types of withdrawal that can kill you: alcohol withdrawal and benzodiazepine withdrawal. If you don’t get me my fucking Xanax, I will have a fucking seizure and die right here and my dad will fucking sue you for everything you are worth. Do you understand me? You are putting me in immediate medical danger.”
He shook my hand off and laughed, like he had heard this pitch before. You brat, his face said.
“Eat something,” he said. “You’ll feel better. Maybe if you sit down and behave, we’ll get you Taco Bell later.”
“I don’t want Taco Bell,” I barked. “I want my fucking Xanax.”
He left the room. On-screen, a high-speed car chase terminated with a massive explosion. The boys didn’t react. Not knowing what else to do, I crumpled onto the couch next to one of them.
“ ’Sup,” he said.
I was livid. I needed a cigarette. I was starving, but I couldn’t possibly eat.
I hoped the withdrawal would cause a grand mal seizure. It would serve them right—all of them, but especially my father.
I imagined myself convulsing on the floor, white foamy spittle on my lips, their helpless faces as they scrambled for a phone. It would be too late. I’d already be dead.
Was there any chance that I could run? I had no money, no phone, no contacts, and certainly no life skills—even I wasn’t naive enough to think I could make it as a runaway. I looked to the windows.
I had been so distracted
that I hadn’t even realized that they were covered in bars.
I was given clean sheets for a lumpy twin bed; on the top bunk was a dark-haired boy with a sparse mustache that belied his age. Fourteen, fifteen, maybe. In the night I heard him weeping, which gave me an erection for reasons I couldn’t explain.
Dizzy from hunger, I ate macaroni and cheese for breakfast. I poured myself a tumbler of milk and mixed a few tablespoons of Nesquik chocolate into the glass with a long spoon. The taste was chalky and saccharine. After, in the privacy of the bedroom, I nursed my protuberant stomach with one hand.
And then, in the bathroom, one of the escorts sat on the toilet and watched me as I lathered my face with shaving cream and ran a razor across my chin. Hand quivering, I swiped my neck. A stinging, the metallic smell of blood, a crimson glistening. He grabbed my hand.
“You’re finished,” he said. It had been an accident. Even at my worst, I had never been a self-mutilator.
Later that day, they gave me a letter from my father. It was reasoned, cautious, and positive. He told me that he wanted to see me move into a life without dependence on drugs; that he knew this approach was not in my comfort zone, and he hoped that I would embrace the program as a new and exotic experience (those were his words, “new and exotic”—the absurdity of this was laughable); and that he apologized for not involving me in the decision-making. “I know this will be a great few weeks for you,” he concluded.
I gave the letter a cursory read, then tossed it aside.
“Don’t you want to keep that?” Tim asked.
“No,” I said.
Tim picked it up and tucked it away. I hated my father for doing this to me, hated him for his optimism and concern. I had already started going to twelve-step meetings, even if I hadn’t been staying sober. I would have been willing to go to a real rehab. Why was this necessary? Pulling me out of bed in the middle of the night, sending me to some godforsaken shithole in the desert? Making me hike?
It wasn’t, I concluded. The whole thing was bullshit. I would play along for as long as I had to, but my father was dead to me.