by Sam Lansky
“Good luck in rehab,” I said.
A day passed. I had voice mails from my employer telling me not to bother coming in, that this was the last straw, that they would mail me my final check.
My rent was due over the coming weekend.
My parents wouldn’t bail me out this time: I was on my own.
I sat on the floor of my apartment and studied my flat-screen television, not wanting to sell it. I thought of Laurel.
I opened my computer and added myself to an online escorting site.
The first man who responded to my ad was a young, attractive advertising executive named Jason. He invited me over to his high-rise in Kendall and we took Ambien and had clinical, dispassionate sex. He paid me $300 and told me that he wanted to see me again, and the next night, he picked me up in his car and we drove into Back Bay for dinner, where, lubricated by red wine and his affections, I could feel myself becoming more radiant and charming than I had ever been before, fawning over him, reaching across the table to touch his hand, collapsing into his gaze.
This was it, I thought, the romance I’d craved; I hadn’t expected it to come like this.
When he dropped me off later, I told him that I really liked him. He tried to give me money. I wouldn’t take it. His face soured.
“I think you’re confused,” he said. “Why would I want to have a relationship with you that’s anything more than transactional?” His words were like a slap.
I sprinted up the stairs into my building and collapsed onto my bed, sobbing from this validation of my worthlessness. I called a friend from rehab and wept into the phone.
“What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” she kept asking, and I didn’t know how to explain what I had done.
This is where my memories begin to splinter, which must mean that it was the end.
The first night was with a man in the South End, and he wanted to smoke meth. “Party,” that’s what the gay users simply call it, just “party,” but what that actually means is smoking meth, except they call it “tina” for some reason. Whatever snobbish disdain I had held for this particular drug, which I’d done only a handful of times and usually guiltily, just seemed so tiresome and so irrelevant now, like such a pointless vestige of a person who I hadn’t been for a long time, and so we smoked his tina and took his GHB, which they call liquid Ecstasy because it’s a clear soluble liquid that tastes the way antibacterial soap smells but makes you swirl in a euphoric daze, and we sprawled in each other’s bodies in the living room in the dark while he was telling me to shut the fuck up because his husband was puttering around in the kitchen illuminated by a beam from the track lighting overhead, pouring himself a glass of wine while I lay on the floor with this stranger who had a husband who was there in the kitchen, wondering if I was invisible.
Then a night, maybe the next night, with a drug dealer in a Range Rover who had a gun in the glove compartment, and he picked me up and there were security cameras in his bedroom, and I sucked his dick to the thunderous beat of house music while men were laughing in the hallway, glasses clinking, my heart palpitating, watching my grainy image on closed-circuit television with wide-open eyes, and then I was in that empty apartment with no furniture that belonged to the tweaker who just wanted one more hit, one more hit, and I told him that I was leaving and he grabbed my coat and his eyes were desperate and red-rimmed and he told me that he would do anything, anything, and there was porn playing on a broken television where men were wearing black latex masks and it wasn’t sexy, and then I was in a house somewhere in Dorchester, and a guy I didn’t know stuck a syringe into the base of my groin (I’m a nurse, he said, I know how to do this, don’t worry, I won’t fuck it up, because you keep going limp and I need to fuck and this is better than Viagra, you’ll stay hard for hours). And I started carrying a crack pipe in my coat pocket and little bags of crystal in my wallet and taking cabs where I would listen to glitchy techno on my headphones and tap my head against the window to the beat until the cabbie looked at me funny, and there were men in the South End and the North End and Beacon Hill and Fenway and Jamaica Plain and Allston and Newton and Waltham, men in apartments and houses, men in the city and in the suburbs, a man in a boutique hotel with art deco fixtures in Cambridge who looked so straitlaced and corporate as he pulled the wedding band from his finger and set it on the nightstand (you piece of shit) and then he lit a joint (marijuana! I’d forgotten you existed), and I drank a bottle of cough syrup in the bathroom and would have been so ashamed if he knew that I was Robo-tripping (how puerile, how humiliating, even though 450 milligrams of dextromethorphan hydrobromide was almost as good as a half lick of ketamine, it’s still a dissociative anesthetic, don’t tell anyone) and from between his legs his stomach was like an undulating plain of sand dunes, rippling as he inhaled and exhaled, and I felt like the air was tickling me. At a different hotel, this one on the Charles River, the hallways were long and circular, and I followed them around for what felt like hours before finding the right room, and the man had scars on his face and he ripped off the condom and I didn’t care, and after it was over I asked him if I fucked like someone who had been sexually abused and laughed too loudly and he gave me a big tip. I came home after a week, or ten days, without having slept at all, and I had $2,000 in cash stuffed haphazardly in various pockets and a quarter ounce of meth and thirty-six new voice mails and the skin around my lips was red and broken and crusting, my hands were charred and bleeding, and I went into work to pick up my things, snorting a fat bump of ketamine out of the strip of skin between my thumb and index finger, dripping with perspiration and cracking up at my boss’s baffled face (not even horrified, just confused, as though I were some sort of mirage that only she could see), elbowing my way into the stockroom to pick up a sweater and a commuter mug and collapsing on the floor, and everyone staring (what’s wrong with him?), and no matter what I put on that rash around my mouth it just seemed to grow and spread like an indelible stain until I imagined that it had spread all over my body. Then, in my apartment, a guy with a sunken torso asked me if I wanted to slam, and he had clean needles and I had a teener (that’s all we need) and I remember marveling at his medical precision as he melted the flakes of blue-white crystal in a spoon with a propane lighter and loaded a syringe with it, a small, narrow syringe, not cartoonish and dirty like I’d imagined but glistening and harmless as a shot that I really needed (it’s time for your medicine), and then he tied a belt around my arm, and told me to take a deep breath because I wasn’t going to be breathing for a long time, and we couldn’t find a vein until finally we found one (and we were both laughing, how strange to be laughing in a moment like that), and he said, “Are you ready for the cough?” and I said “What cough?” and as he plunged the needle into my arm I remember a heat spreading through me starting from my chest and oscillating out to my appendages and digits and then I coughed just like he said, one short, hot cough, and I was in a fever for days and I don’t remember anything except getting out of the shower to hear the fire alarm shrieking and the four men (what were their names?) who had been in my apartment were gone, two freebase pipes left smoldering on the ground, leaving black residue on the hardwood floor, and the lights were on and I hadn’t seen sunlight in what felt like an eternity, and the room was full of red light. Crystal meth tore my body apart like nothing else ever had, especially when it was injected directly into my veins; it forced its way out of my skin in acneic sores and I could taste that hot chemical smell in my mouth, all the time. My cuticles were shredded and bloody, a bright, dark pink, the color of exposed gums at the dentist, the color of asbestos insulation in attics, a Crayola crayon color, and they bled constantly, and my arms were pocked with track marks. It was like this for two months, maybe three, and it felt like a week and also like a lifetime, and by two months into this run I was someone completely different and I did not know myself anymore, and frequently I thought of a man I heard speak in a meeting once, whose voice was strong and sonorous until it crack
ed midsyllable and he began to cry and said, “Meth took everything from me,” and it was sad but I didn’t know what he meant, imagined that he meant things like a house and a car and a family, didn’t know that he was talking about something intangible but necessary, something that he could never get back.
Even thousands of miles away, my mother always knew when I was on drugs, and she called me, her voice grave‚ begging me to please get help.
There were no words to explain that I had fallen too far, that I didn’t have the strength to ever get sober again, that I didn’t know how to moderate and I didn’t know how to quit, that even when I promised myself that I wouldn’t pick up I ended up slamming crystal, that I had lost the power of choice, that it was too hard and I had given up, that I was going to shoot meth until I died, that I hoped that would be soon—and what was most fascinating (to me) was that I felt none of this with the self-aggrandizing theatricality of how I’d felt even a few months earlier but rather, with a slightly rueful resignation, as detached as if the circumstances of my life were a distant tragedy occurring to strangers somewhere very far away.
Charlie sent me emails telling me to just go to a fucking meeting already and also I should probably get tested for hepatitis C (among other things), and I ignored him because I knew with utter conviction that I could not stop.
I could not stop.
My father told me in an email that he was getting me a plane ticket to San Francisco, where he had moved to from New York, and I could stay with him and detox there if I wanted to get clean. The date of the flight approached, but I had already decided that I wasn’t going; I couldn’t leave my apartment anymore for any reason, let alone to travel across the country.
Reduced to a cliché of tweaker paranoia, I peeked out the windows at the speeding cars on Massachusetts Avenue and played German trance music at deafening volumes so the secret listeners couldn’t hear (I considered them a viable threat) and scrubbed the hardwood floors with lemon polish twice a day. (Are those fucking paparazzi outside again? And I laughed alone in my shiny apartment.) In the hours before the flight I slammed again (telling myself, as I always did, that it would be the last time, and also making sure I had enough left to do it again later), and I began throwing clothes into suitcases, emptying the cabinets full of dishes and silverware into black trash bags, the symphony of shattering glass, and my hands were bleeding again, smoking cigarettes, freebasing meth, deciding that I wasn’t going, and then packing again, unable to leave but unable to stay.
Ninety minutes before my flight, I called a john who lived nearby in Somerville and asked him to come drive me to the airport, and before I could tell him not to bother he said sure, that he would be there in fifteen minutes. (His name was Rick and he told me once while he was fucking me that he wished I were Korean because he really preferred Asian guys; I did not know what to say to him then, and I would not know what to say to him if I saw him today, but I owe him a tremendous debt.) And when his car pulled up I left my furniture and television, food that I never ate still sitting in the refrigerator with all the labels facing out and conservative New England overcoats still hanging neatly in the wardrobe on walnut hangers spaced exactly one-inch apart (I’d measured while high on meth one night), and I got into his car and he told me I looked like shit and we drove to Boston Logan and I knew that I wasn’t going to make it—there was no way I was going to make it on this flight, it was all a joke, and like an idiot I had thrown away my freebase pipe and now I was going to have to go all the way to that fucking head shop by the Fens to buy another pipe or maybe I could steal one from Ian, that slampig in Charlestown, if I could lure him over to my place by telling him I had picked up good shit—and I was sprinting through security, panting, drenched in sweat. And at the gate I knew that once I boarded this plane, I could never go back to this life; that if I went to San Francisco, I would need to detox and count days of sobriety and start over, and in a flash, as I handed the flight attendant my ragged boarding pass, I relived the most joyful moments of my storied career in addiction, daytime drunks on Upper East Side rooftops with friends I thought I’d have forever, sex on Ecstasy with a boy I once loved profoundly, and the sheer ecstatic euphoria of the first time I shot meth, like a thousand orgasms collapsing into one breathless instant of pure happiness, and I wasn’t ready for it to end and I buckled my seat belt and I did not believe that I would survive. And my mouth was bleeding and I spilled the ice water that the flight attendant brought me and babies screamed and my ears were ringing and there were spiders crawling under my skin and the muscular grinding of the wheels against the concrete made me shake and in the cramped lavatory I crumpled to my knees and I prayed.
Please, God, if you are out there please help me to do this because I can’t and if you won’t do it for me because I know this is all my fault and I haven’t earned your grace then don’t do it for me, God, do it for anyone who loves me, even if nobody does.
My father met me at the airport in San Francisco, and his expression was cold and blank when he saw my staggering gait, my ravaged face, my bleary bloodshot eyes, that abraded skin around my lips, my jaw locking my mouth in an underbite, and he didn’t touch me. In the car I wanted to tell him about the epic battle between good and evil that had been waging in my body for months, about how far I had fallen, about how afraid I had been, about how I was certain that I had lost everything. That I had worked so hard in the pursuit of some greatness that was always just beyond my grasp, and in doing so, I’d managed to wreck my entire life, a life that had only just begun.
But instead I began to cry and said “Daddy,” and I kept waiting for him to look at me while searing beams of headlight blinded me and happy people smiled on billboards and he just kept his gaze fixed on the road, driving on into the night.
The next day, before the sun rose, I walked to an early-morning twelve-step meeting in the Castro. My legs ached. I was dumbfounded that I was alive, that I had survived the night. The spring air was balmy and fragrant.
I told the people in the meeting my name, and I said I was an alcoholic and a drug addict.
“This is it,” I said, sobbing to a complete stranger. “It’s over. I’m done. I will never go back there, as long as I live. I will never do this again. I will do whatever it takes. It will never be like that again.”
“Take it one day at a time,” she said soothingly. “That’s how this works.”
“No,” I said. “You don’t understand. You don’t know the things I’ve been through. You don’t know the things I’ve done. This is the end.”
“What if you don’t say it’s the end?” she said. “What if it’s just the beginning of something new?”
The people there gave me their phone numbers and told me to call anytime, day or night.
And I kept my jacket on so they couldn’t see my arms, which were so bitten with track marks and abscesses that it was a week before I could raise them above my head.
Eleven
I was nineteen when I got sober. At the time it felt very old, like I had passed my expiration date a hundred times. In the beginning, I carried myself with the weariness of someone who had survived a war.
After a month with my father and Jennifer in San Francisco, counting days of sobriety, I returned to Portland to stay at my mother’s house in the woods. I had no plan, no lofty goals. Maybe I would get a low-pressure job somewhere nearby, I thought. Maybe that would be as big as my life ever got again.
I enrolled in classes at the local university, where I spent my days. At night, I went to twelve-step meetings and stayed up all night with the other sober kids I met. We rolled through the starry streets in beat-up old cars that stank of stale cigarettes, pounding energy drinks and talking shit.
In the mornings, I prayed on my knees that God would keep me clean and sober for one more day.
I collected a thirty-day coin, then a sixty-day, then a ninety-day.
My mother would wake me up in the morning with a cup of sweet coffee. Sh
e cried often out of sheer relief, and for once, I did not mind her sentimentality.
“You’re a miracle,” she said.
All of my new friends were sleeping with one another, but I was afraid to date. “You can’t drink with a dick in your mouth,” one of them joked, which always made me laugh.
But I was sober, and that meant I had lost my edge, my verve, the confidence that would surge up when I was intoxicated. There were still so many pieces of me that were damaged. I couldn’t fathom that anyone could take me as I was, after all the things I had done.
A few months after I got sober, I asked my new sponsor, Brian, why nobody ever talked about slamming crystal in meetings. It was hardly an underground thing, I said; surely I had shot up with half the gay dudes in Boston.
“It’s not that nobody does it,” he said. “It’s just that nobody makes it back.”
Brian taught me what to say when people ask me why I don’t drink alcohol: I tell them that I’m allergic, and if they ask what happens when I do drink, I tell them that I break out in crystal meth. It’s a shame that most people have too much decorum to ask, so I don’t get to use that line very often.
And it was with Brian that I sat on the balcony of my home, surrounded by a dense canopy of coniferous trees, and wrote down a list of the qualities that I had always wanted in my ideal partner: a man whose intelligence was surpassed only by his kindness, a man who would accept me no matter how grievous my mistakes had been. Once the list was compete, we lit the sheet of paper on fire, watching it turn to ash, sending smoke signals up to God or the ocean that I might someday be loved.
Then came Michael.
I met him at a coffee shop in downtown Portland for our first real date. I was self-conscious, but so was he. We talked about all the things you aren’t supposed to talk about on a first date—religion, politics, previous relationships—and we talked about how we were talking about those. How taboo that was supposed to be, but how natural it felt.