Whip Smart: A Memoir

by Melissa Febos

  The painter didn’t ask questions; he doted on my precocity, my big breasts and hands, my little ears.

  “Look at you!” he said once, after sex, lifting up his 300-thread-count sheet. “Every part of you is so smooth and perfect!” I blushed and scooted out of his bed, quietly loving it. His doting differed from that of my slaves; I got to play the child with him, and found that a surprising relief. After locating my panties and pulling on a T-shirt, I padded into the kitchen. I spent most of that summer like this: wandering around his central-air-conditioned house in my underwear—just a few blocks away from Autumn and my place in Williamsburg. I opened his fridge and stood in its pale light, surveying the contents. I grabbed a quart of organic yogurt, pulled a spoon from the drying rack in the sink, and headed back into the bedroom.

  The painter reclined against his pillows holding a magazine, his reading glasses on. I curled up in a chair near the foot of the bed.

  “What are you reading?” I said.

  “Oh, just some stupid art magazine, did a profile on me.” He folded his glasses on the bed stand and clasped his hands behind his head, looking at me appreciatively.

  “So what about this whole sponsor thing?” I asked, with a careful note of irony. “I keep hearing that I ought to pick one of those up.” I ate a spoonful of yogurt and raised my brows at him.

  Smiling faintly, he shrugged. “It’s a good idea, of course. But you should be careful. You can’t just take the first person who offers—they’re always the most desperate. There’s a lot of people in the rooms who get off on telling newcomers what to do, when it’s outside the jurisdiction of their own experience. Without sounding dramatic, it can be dangerous.”

  “Do you have one?”

  “I have people who I call when I need to work something out. That’s what matters—that you know not to try and figure everything out yourself.”

  I put the yogurt on the floor and crawled up the length of the bed until I was straddling him. “So, if I have you, does that count?” I bent down, glancing up to see his smile broaden as I kissed his chest.

  “It counts for something,” he said.

  Most people in the program would have disagreed, of course, but I was relieved. I wanted to hide out in his cool, dark house for as long as possible. I didn’t need the cool, dark escape of a high as long as I had here to come to, it seemed. The painter had been sober for over a decade, and as much as he may have omitted in the interest of keeping me around, I learned a lot about sobriety from him, in his cool, nonchalant way. People in meetings could render everything so life-or-death. His was probably the only way I could have heard a lot of it.

  When I arrived on his door one night with pupils pinned and a husky heroin voice, he let me in and believed my lie about codeine pills. However selfish his motives may have been, that nonplussed acceptance made it easier for me to stick around, keep going to meetings.

  I think the only way I stayed as clean as I did was on the back of the painter’s motorcycle. At my request, we would speed up and down the FDR Drive at night, flying along the East River, past the Pepsi-Cola sign, and the park where I shot up with street kids during my first summer in the city. Back and forth from Brooklyn to Manhattan. New York at night, from its bridges, is a miracle. When I first came to the city, it took all my fantasies and set them on fire, turned them into flickering constellations of light. Then it did the same with my history. As a dark speck of energy hurtling over the water toward that galaxy, I felt myself disappear. Relative to that image of infinity I was nothing, a clump of quantum matter skidding through the ether. It was as good as any drug.

  16

  “ IS THERE ANYONE new to the meeting?” asked the meeting secretary, who made announcements and handed out coins after the speaker finished their “qualification.” The crowd clapped and gave a, “Welcome!” in shaky unison after each person new to the meeting and each person visiting from out of town announced their name and status: addict, alcoholic, addict/alcoholic, grateful recovering alcoholic.

  “Is there anyone counting days?” Autumn, beside me, raised her hand. The secretary smiled in her direction.

  “Autumn, alcoholic, and I’ve got seventy-nine days,” she said, and everyone clapped, with a few hoots mixed in. As newcomers, she and I were the darlings of our now regular Wednesday meeting, at least until we reached ninety days.

  “Anyone else counting days?” asked the secretary, and Autumn kicked my foot. I raised my hand halfway.

  “Melissa?”

  I shot a dirty look toward Autumn.

  “I’ve got sixty days today,” I said. More clapping and hooting. I felt my face flush and couldn’t help grinning.

  The secretary beckoned. “We have a coin for that, you know. C’mon up here!”

  I rose from my folding chair and headed up the aisle as the clapping continued. When I reached her, the secretary handed me a plastic coin with a gold 60 embossed on one side. On the other side, in tiny print, read: To Thine Own Self Be True. As she hugged me, I felt a tiny crumpling in my chest. I hurried back to my seat. Autumn blew me a kiss, and I rolled my eyes.

  “You should be proud!” she whispered.

  I was proud. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been this clean. The program was, as they liked to say, doing for me what I could not do for myself. The thing was, I still couldn’t stop getting high. The difference was radical: instead of getting high every day or every four days, I slipped every few weeks. To a junky, a difference of weeks might as well be eternity. Over the past couple years, I had been trying to stay clean for a consecutive week and failing. Leaving the country hadn’t even kept me clean. This drastic difference, I told myself, was nearly the same as being sober. Hadn’t I wished countless times for the ability to use just once a month or so? To be a recreational drug user again? I’d never planned on being completely abstinent. But that’s what AA called for. I loved meetings, and my life had quickly come to revolve around them, around the host of new friends I’d found there. The people in East Village and Williamsburg meetings were people I would have gotten high with. I loved the stories, as I had always loved those kinds of stories. I loved having my four minutes to talk. It was all a perfect forum for me to practice looking and sounding the way I thought I ought to, which was its own kind of power. I did want help. I just didn’t know any other way.

  I counted the days I didn’t use, and I believed most of what they said. I had never had a problem believing one thing and doing another. For a while, it continued to work. The meetings made me feel better. My dread subsided to a manageable size. But every three weeks or so, I would get obliterated. Lying in meetings bothered me some—especially during moments like that one—but telling the truth about my slips was unfathomable, unnecessary. Lies like this one had never eroded my self-esteem, as I had come to believe bigger lies did. Who was I hurting? Everyone took pleasure in being proud of my accomplishment, so what if it itched at me occasionally? Lying to Autumn bothered me more, but not unmanageably. I viewed other people’s sobriety skeptically, too, finding it hard to believe that every single person who claimed that they had five, ten, twenty years without a drink or a drug had really never taken a sip, or a drag, or a snort, or a pill.

  A few days after I accepted my sixty-day chip, my dad called to say that he and my grandmother were going to be in the city the next morning and would I like to have breakfast with them? I agreed. Autumn was out of town that weekend and had enlisted me to dog-sit her two pit bulls, Reddog and Little Girl. When Kevin called that night, I couldn’t not answer. I walked those dogs halfway to Bed-Stuy and walked home with four sessions’ worth of heroin and cocaine. With a syringe I’d saved in an envelope wrapped in a sock, wrapped in a sock in the back of my bureau, I shot up all of it that night. The way those dogs stared at me didn’t make me start to hate myself until I ran out of heroin. Animals know things, and you can see yourself in anything that depends on you. Shame was unrecognizable to me then, but I felt its oily weight all th
rough me, despite the drugs.

  A speedball hits you like a huge, warm wave. The back of your neck throbs, your ears ring, and everything inside of you muffles while everything outside of you sharpens. The initial rush of it doesn’t last long, a minute, maybe two. Then it’s a downward slide into a normal high. Only the first one can be perfect. After that, you need more of everything. That night, toward dawn, after I had run out of heroin and was shooting straight cocaine—which shouldn’t have had much effect at all, I’d done so much by that point—that minute or two stretched into eight. Instead of sinking, the rush rose and rose. I would have cried if I weren’t too terrified of my heart beating any faster than it was. Breathing tiny sips of air, I focused on the grain of the wood floor between my feet. I recited multiplication tables, the names of my fifth-grade classmates, anything that I thought would steady me. It was over an hour before I felt safe to move again. Staring at the floor that night, I had teetered on the edge of some infinity. I’d felt the way I occasionally had staring at high tide. Horrifically small. Right sized.

  I had instructed my father and grandmother to meet me at a vegetarian café in Alphabet City. Sleepless and still high, I gingerly made my way into the city, trying not to vomit on the subway. You’d think I’d have been more anxious than I was. Partly, my anxiety about heading to brunch still high, with needle-bruised arms and a gray complexion, was quelled by the drugs. A heroin hangover has little in common with an alcohol hangover. Nausea is always miserable, but much less so with opiates in your system. I actually enjoyed the vacuous, papery feeling that followed a speedball binge. I might have had the eyes of a zombie and track marks up my sleeves when I greeted my father and grandmother outside the café, but they couldn’t see them.

  “Hi!” I shouted when I saw my father and grandmother approaching, determined to distract them from my cadaverous appearance with enthusiasm. Squeezing them both in vigorous hugs, I hoped my hair didn’t reek of cigarette smoke. I’d managed to hide even my smoking from my family for the last six years.

  “Oh,” exclaimed my tiny grandmother, “you’re so thin!” I waved off the comment, leading them inside, to a booth far away from the window. I had plenty else to talk about. Amusing anecdotes about my landlords, the dogs, and my “catering” job filled the two hours, and neither seemed to notice that I didn’t touch my food.

  “Try some tofu scramble!” I urged them, and kept careful watch for the sort of worried eyes I had become used to getting from people. To my relief, my father and grandmother both appeared delighted by my energy and tales of my colorful city life. By the time our check arrived, I trembled with the effort it had taken to pull off. We hugged good-bye outside the restaurant. For a moment, as my dad gave me an extra squeeze, the familiar smell of his coat pressed against my cheek, I felt a surge of grief in my chest, and the corners of my mouth quivered downward. I squeezed him back, then pushed him away and smiled: “I’ll hail you two a cab.” I watched them wave through the car’s rear window, and waited until it turned the corner before staggering into Tompkins Square Park to gather my breath. I sat on a bench and took a few deep breaths, watching the park’s playground through a row of bushes. Nannies and mothers stood in clusters on the sidelines as their children ran and climbed, screaming with glee as they flung their tiny bodies around. I had survived. A familiar pride rippled through me. Things weren’t as bad as I thought. I functioned under the assumption that when it got bad enough, I wouldn’t be able to hide it any longer. If it ever got bad enough, my family would find out and I would check into a rehab somewhere. Junkies didn’t graduate from college with a 4.0 GPA. They didn’t manage brunch with Grandma. Relieved and wasted, I enjoyed a few minutes of happy exhaustion before the nausea returned and a sudden surge sent me running to a nearby trash can. I retched a few times, wiped my mouth with a napkin, and headed home, careful to avoid looking back at the playground to see if the people there had heard me.

  When I first starting getting high, the world seemed to square itself. It was enormous; my thoughts were enormous; everything glowed with possibility. That magical defamiliarization had ended years ago, and since then the world had been shrinking. What I now called partying was hiding alone in the middle of the night and taking drugs until I made myself sick. I even had a special position I would lie in when I became too nauseous to move. Most of my time being high was spent waiting to stop feeling sick so that I could do more. Secrecy had whittled my life down to a single locked room with a glass of water, a bag of puke, and a coffee can full of pee in the closet, because I was too afraid of the floorboards creaking on my way to the bathroom. I couldn’t leave the rug. I might have been a goddess all week long at work, but here I was a slave.

  Pulling off the brunch with such success made me cocky. When I met up with Kevin again that night and he only had coke, I bought some, ignoring the fact that coke without heroin usually ended in miserable hell for me.

  Autumn was home, and instinctively I lied, claiming that I was coming down with something and needed to hit the sack early. Her studio being directly below mine, I was petrified to walk on the creaky wood floor, for fear that she’d hear me and come upstairs to see what I was up to. I made myself stay on the rug that covered a small area around my bed, sniffing lines off of a compact mirror. I spent that night organizing my sock drawer for six hours. There wasn’t much else to do on the rug, and my obsessive drive had low standards for what occupied it. By the time I’d finished, my nostrils were stuffed with rolled-up toilet paper to quell the throbbing that ensued whenever I wasn’t inhaling more coke. That was the fun part.

  When I still had an hour’s supply left, the scary part began. The insanity of how much was left and how to get more—as impossible and logically undesirable as it was at near morning—began in earnest. When I had lived in Bed-Stuy, it was possible to creep out of my apartment at dawn and roam the streets in search of more drugs. I had intentionally made this task harder. Crack dealers were not loitering in the alleys of Williamsburg at five in the morning. When daylight crept through the curtains and engines began rumbling in neighboring driveways, I felt skinless, as if some crucial outer layer had been ripped off of me. My cocaine crashes always shared this symptom with heroin withdrawal: painful sensory amplification. I’m not talking about a psychedelic, gaga sensory experience here; I am talking about what it must feel like to pop out of the womb. A menacing attack on the senses. Everyday noises felt like physical blows. Every smell was repulsive, gag inducing; every light, a blinding interrogation. The challenge was no longer how to get more drugs but how to quiet my anxiety. I had tried it all before: hot showers, aromatic candles, soothing music. Nothing worked. My body shuddered with nakedness; candles brought visions of house fire; soothing music was as useful as those $3 street-hawked umbrellas in a hurricane. Each only emphasized my powerlessness over the juggernaut of that feeling.

  As I lay in my bed, every muscle clenched in the effort to relax, I prayed for relief. I didn’t feel better for a long time, but one thing did become clear. I was waiting in vain to be found out and rescued.

  17

  “HOW ARE YOU?” Rebecca asked me over lunch one afternoon. I smiled at my steaming plate of kale and tofu. “I’m great!” I didn’t look up to see if she believed me. I had been great the last few times I’d seen her, thrilled and overconfident in my success in AA. Only in her relief at my sobriety had I first seen the extent of her worry. When I told her I was clean, she described to me the dread she used to feel when she’d come home to find me scrubbing the kitchen—an idiosyncratic habit of mine when high. While I had felt uncomfortable acknowledging the addiction I’d worked so hard to hide from her, I felt our friendship surge forward with new intimacy. I told myself now that the usual ease between us was missing only as a result of seeing each other less, though distance had never much affected us. I saw her less frequently than ever lately. My life had divided into such distinct parts: the dungeon and meetings. The difficulty of maintaining friendships outs
ide of these only increased. I couldn’t tell anyone the whole truth about either, which burdened even my friendships within those spheres; it had begun to feel like too much work to deal with outsiders.

  “Good! Meetings are good? Any new clients at work?” She grinned, going for what had always been an easy topic.

  “Not really.” I beckoned to our waiter and asked for some brown rice. “I’m actually kind of bored at work.”

  “Bored?”

  “I know, it sounds unlikely, right? But every day it’s the same things; they all want the same depressing things. I’m sick of it.”

  She shrugged. “Well, maybe it’s being sober. I mean, maybe you’re too conscious, or something. I mean, it’s always been bizarrely easy for you to not be affected by what you do there. Maybe you should take a break or something.”

  I nodded. This made sense, of course, but it’s hard to accept advice when you never give all the facts.

  Work had become miserable. I’d begun to dread my sessions weeks ago, but after that binge the scales tipped. I spent my shifts on the dressing room couch, swaddled in a blanket, praying that the clients wouldn’t pick me. When they did, I staggered through the sessions, wondering how it had ever seemed easy. The closeness of their bodies was excruciating. It was another kind of feeling skinned. Previously, I felt protected from the depressing reality of my clients. They were powerless, craving animals, and I was a professional. My participation was elective, and thus I felt immune to their mucky baggage. This changed. If their powerlessness and shame were a bog that I had previously traversed untouched, stepping from stone to stone, I was now slipping. I could smell it—the brackish stink under me—on my hands and feet, in my hair when I woke up in the morning.