WHILE IT MAY have been my secret fantasy to start living a normal life, the other kids didn’t view me as normal. It took me almost six months to realize that one reason might have been that I was still wearing these shiny black satin pants, a red muscle shirt, and either Capezio dance shoes or checkered Vans. It was too weird to even make fun of, so for a while the other kids just left me alone.
Once a year Mom would get five pairs of the pants custom made for me, and she would buy an equal number of red muscle shirts, which she liked because they were made of a 100 percent cotton, not an easy thing to find in the 1980s. Kyle’s wardrobe consisted of a couple of identical kung fu uniforms, and—when those needed to be washed—the satin pants and muscle shirts I had grown out of. My only friend, it seemed by default, was one of the other white kids, Muni. The other white girl was so awkward that not even the teachers could talk to her. I never heard her say one word.
I realized I couldn’t keep wearing this same uniform every day if I had any hope of fitting in at all, so at Christmas break Mom took us to the mall to get some new clothes, protesting the whole way there that we looked fine. She objected to the fact that we would now have to waste valuable time thinking about what we were going to wear just so we could look like everybody else. She was so against the idea that I figured we would go in and grab some stuff off the rack and be done with it, but eight hours later I was in tears, pleading to just go back to Berkeley and get some more satin pants made. It felt as though we had tried on everything in the mall at least three different times. Every time I tried a new shirt, it meant retrying all the pants I had already put on to see how they went together, and just when we thought we were done, Mom would see something she hadn’t seen before, or she would catch me glancing at something, and we’d have to start the whole process over again.
The mall was absolute hell, but I did come out of there looking a little less vaudevillian. Walking back to the car, we could have almost been mistaken for a couple of normal kids, except for the fact that we had somehow ended up getting our ears pierced. The part about looking like everyone else did concern me. I just didn’t want to look like a clown.
THE CHANGE IN STYLE worked as far as getting the other kids to talk to me.
“What are you, some sort of fag or something?” Akbar asked me when I came back from break. Akbar was the most popular kid in the class. He was charismatic and good-looking, and his dad was well known for owning the Black Muslim Bakery. Despite the insult, it was the first time anyone other than Muni had talked to me since I started going to school, so I took it as a good sign.
“Would you call Mr. T. a fag?” I asked him.
“Well…uh, no, but…”
“Anyway, you’re only gay if you pierce your right ear, not your left,” I clarified.
Soon after that I was allowed to join the basketball games at recess, and it kind of sort of seemed as if I had friends. I was getting a little too comfortable with them, though, because when I called Akbar “blood” one day, trying to get him to pass me the ball, he spat on the ground and said, “Uh-uh, man. You ain’t my blood.”
“Come on, cuz. I didn’t mean anything by it,” I responded.
“What’s wrong wich you, honky? You ain’t my cousin neither.”
I had never thought about what these words meant and assumed that they were just terms of familiarity. Now I realized they were about race. My new clothes may have helped, but there was no way I was ever going to completely fit in. I had been calling Muni and Kyle blood and cuz for so long it was just part of my vocabulary, and I kept using the terms out of habit until I had almost no friends again. I didn’t understand why we couldn’t all be bloods and cuzzes.
After all, we had learned in class that everyone originally came from Africa. We also learned about a lot of the atrocities “my people” had done to other people that didn’t look like me, and I could understand why the other kids didn’t want me to call them blood. I didn’t want to be associated with white folks either. In American history we learned about the genocide of the Indians, slavery, the lynching of black folks by the KKK, and the shooting of white folks who helped blacks in the civil rights movement. In California history class we learned about Japanese internment camps and Cesar Chavez’s struggles to help the Farm Workers Union. At home I learned about Ronald Reagan’s secret war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the lower classes right here at home. In my ten years of life, I really hadn’t seen many examples of white people, or more specifically white men, that negated any of these horror stories.
I don’t know if it was because of white guilt or what, but I ended up joining a South African Dance Troupe and spent my weekends up at UC Berkeley protesting U.S. involvement and support for apartheid. When Kyle and I started taking part, there were no more than ten or fifteen people following this guy with a bullhorn who would yell at students to boycott the university. As more people joined the protests, he started organizing sit-ins and got people to handcuff themselves in front of doorways. In a very short amount of time, there were a few thousand people marching onto campus demanding that the UC system divest its money from South Africa. What had started with a guy holding a bullhorn had turned into a national movement.
For the most part the protests were peaceful, and the police only focused on those who were obstructing access to buildings or roads, but as the gatherings grew in size it became harder to know what was going to happen. Riots had broken out a few times, and Mom was worried that if Kyle or I got arrested, she would be deemed an unfit mother and they would take us away from her. Instead of not allowing us to go, however, she made some kind of arrangement with Wavy Gravy, our old camp leader, that if either of us got arrested, we should tell the authorities that we were under Wavy’s care and should be returned to our mother.
Because of my new guardian, I was now free to do whatever I wanted as long as it didn’t interfere with any of my ten other extracurricular activities, which included tap dancing on Monday, jazz and modern dance class on Tuesday and Wednesday, South African percussion class on Thursday afternoon (before heading to gymnastics class), and Capoeira on Friday night. Saturdays were usually my day to go and protest apartheid or nuclear weapons, and then on Sunday I would take BART into the city to the juggling meet in Golden Gate Park. It seemed like every minute of every day was accounted for. No wonder I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. I might as well have stayed in the circus. The fatigue, coupled with the thought of having to do it all over again the next week, was overwhelming. I felt like that Greek guy who pushed a rock up a hill every day, just to watch it roll back down.
Mornings were always horrific, and I pretty much hated everyone and everything until about noon. Mostly I hated my mom, whose job it was to get me out of bed. She tried all sorts of ways to get me up, but the most ruthless trick was the water treatment: threatening to pour a bucket of cold water over me. In the beginning, it worked like a charm, but one day I was too tired to care if she poured cold water on me or not and found out that she was incapable of bringing herself to follow through with it. Instead she talked Kyle into doing it, and it worked. I jumped out of bed kicking and punching Kyle. I then crawled back under the covers, threatening to beat the shit out of anyone who ever tried that on me again.
“You motherfucking cocksuckers!” I yelled at them. “I’m coming into your fucking rooms tonight, and I’m gonna pour water on your heads. See how you fucking like it.” I was wide awake, seething with hatred. I stayed in bed out of protest.
“Come on, honey. You have to get up. Remember how hard we tried to get you into school? We can’t let them down after all that.”
This was another thing she brought up every morning.
“I don’t give a shit. You don’t pour water on someone when they’re asleep, for fuck’s sake.”
“I didn’t do it. Kyle did. I would never do that to you.”
“You fucking told him to do it. That’s even worse.”
“Oran David Can
field! Get out of bed right now!” she yelled, trying out authoritarianism.
“No.”
“This instant!” It was rare that she tried the same trick two sentences in a row.
“Fuck you.”
“What did you say?” She was almost laughing at the absurdity of it, which pissed me off even more.
“You heard me.”
“You just said that to your own mother? Well, since none of this is working you leave me no choice but to come over there and physically get you out of bed.”
“How about leaving me the fuck alone?”
“I can’t do that, honey, because then you won’t make it to class, and I’ll look like a bad mother,” she said, getting closer to the bed.
“I don’t care what you look like,” I said, at which point she grabbed my arms and tried to pull me out. I started thrashing my arms around, trying to scare her off, but she didn’t give up. She got her arms around my waist, and I flinched and let out a little laugh despite being as angry as I ever had been. I could see the lightbulb turn on above her head when she realized what just happened.
“Aha!” she said, going for my armpits this time.
“Goddamnit.” I was trying to yell through the most painful involuntary laughter I had ever experienced. “Fuck you!” I screamed, leaping out of bed. “That is totally unfair. Don’t you ever do that to me again.”
But she did. Almost every morning I woke up to the threat and eventual execution of the “tickle treatment.”
Kyle never had a problem waking up, and in retaliation for getting beat up over the water treatment, he somehow snuck into my room, and I woke up naked with my wrists handcuffed together behind my back. It was unclear how Kyle had come across a pair of handcuffs, or why he didn’t have a key for them, but I showed up late to school that day with a note from the police officer who had been called to let me out of the things. I couldn’t understand how Kyle didn’t get in trouble for that one. I got in trouble for everything. When Mom caught me eating a hamburger, she dragged me to the McDonald’s, asked to speak to the manager, and demanded that they tape one of my school photos to the wall and never serve me again. The punishment for handcuffing your brother in his sleep was laughter. Even the cop laughed at me.
ten
Tells of a series of bad decisions, which lead to a terrible fall
DRIVING INTO San Francisco was always an amazing experience, even if I was only gone for a few hours. This time I had been away for a month, and I was coming home to an awesome girlfriend, my new recording studio, and a bunch of bands, and we still had our Saturday night improv noise thing going. It was the life I had always envisioned for myself, ever since my days at The Farm. Using some kind of bizarre logic, I decided that if I felt this good clean, just imagine how good I would feel if I got high. I didn’t see any danger in it because it was fairly obvious that the only reason I got addicted in the first place was because I had been so sad and depressed at the time. Feeling good was a totally different scenario, and anyway, after that fucking tour, I deserved to do it one more time.
An hour later I was hiding the straw and the foil wondering, What the fuck is wrong with you? You stupid piece of shit. I can’t fucking believe you would do this shit again. And after everything you just fucking went through? My internal dialogue was interrupted by the phone ringing. It was Heather calling me back from work.
“Hey, O. I’m leaving now. I can’t wait to see you. Where did you want to meet?”
“Well, actually it turns out I’m super wiped out from the drive. I didn’t get any sleep last night, and I think I just need to take it easy.”
“Uh…I’m pretty tired, too. But I thought since you just got back…that…you know we could just be tired together.”
“Yeah…I don’t know…I mean, I won’t be any fun to hang out with, you know? It was a pretty rough month, and I’ve been around people twenty-four hours a day. I think I just need to be alone right now.”
“When have you ever been fun?” she asked.
I tried to force a laugh, but there was too much truth in that joke. “Listen. How about tomorrow? I’m just too out of it right now.” It was the wrong thing to say. The whole situation was wrong and I knew it. Heather had rehearsal the next night, and an opening at the gallery the night after that, and still I made up excuses not to see her on the only night she was available. I couldn’t face her after I had just spent a month trying to get clean, only to relapse the moment I got home. My theory about feeling too good had turned out to be wrong. At least I only fucked up once, I thought. I just won’t do it again.
The problem was that I didn’t feel quite so good about myself the next day, and the urge to get high was overwhelming. Since Heather was busy anyway, why not just one more time?
There was always an excuse that, no matter how unbelievably ridiculous it may have sounded after I got high, made more sense than anything in the whole world beforehand. I tended to make the worst decisions stone-cold sober and could only see how stupid they were after it was too late. This went on until I was right back to where I was before. Lying to Heather, faking orgasms, waking up sick. The same exact bullshit all over again. I don’t know how she didn’t see it.
It stopped being the same when I started running out of money. The tour had wiped me out. What little money I had left from my dad’s loan, I had spent on the road, and the three hundred dollars that Grux had given us when we got home didn’t last too long. I figured if I switched over to using needles just until I got some money, I might be able to make it through until I got some work, without getting sick. Seeing all that smoke when I exhaled seemed like a waste. A needle seemed a lot more efficient.
I also came up with a new idea to quit. It was something I had read about on the Internet called “rapid opiate detox,” where they put you under general anesthesia and give you an opiate blocker called Naltrexone, which would kick all the heroin out of your system in a matter of hours instead of days. When you woke up the next day, you would be clean. The big issue with it was that it was only being done in Canada and cost ten thousand dollars. If I had ten thousand dollars, I wouldn’t have had to quit. A little more research taught me that Naltrexone was also used to deter heroin addicts from relapsing and could be found at the local pharmacy for five bucks. I could just do it myself for a savings of $9,995. What a rip-off.
Meanwhile, lying to Heather was stressing me out so much that I broke up with her. My rationale was that I cared too much about her to see her wasting her time with a pathetic piece of shit like me. Racked with guilt and self-loathing, I admitted to her that I had started using heroin the moment I got back from tour.
“I just need some time by myself to sort all this shit out,” I told her, bracing myself for at least a little drama.
“Okay. Good luck with that,” she said sincerely. Even though I broke up with her, I couldn’t help but be disappointed at how easy it had been.
To complicate matters, Jibz had finally decided that I was the right one for her after all. I couldn’t have agreed with her more, but heroin, while fucking me up in so many ways, did allow me to see through the distorted lens of emotions that I usually based all my decisions on.
With my feelings no longer in the way, it was obvious to me that it just wasn’t going to work out between us. Not now, anyway.
She didn’t give up so easily. In a complete role reversal, she tried to convince me that we were always meant to be together, she just never saw it before. It was the same line I had been using on her for years, which made the situation harder to get out of. The only excuse I could come up with was that I was a junkie, thinking that would surely scare her away. But it only made her more determined. She wanted to save me.
Jibz was the only other person besides Heather who knew I was doing drugs. I told her about this rapid opiate detox thing, and that I was going to do it at a motel my roommate worked at in the Marina. She offered to come with me and be there when things got rough, but I decided I’
d better do it on my own. I didn’t want anyone to see me squirming around in a pool of sweat while vomiting and shitting for six straight hours.
From the accounts I had read it was definitely going to be bad, but I had been through some rough shit before and figured I could take anything for six hours. A common theme was that the Naltrexone detox wouldn’t kill you, but it would sure as hell make you wish that it had. Trying not think about it, I checked into the motel, poured myself a cup of water, and swallowed the harmless-looking pill.
It got so bad so fast that within an hour I wished I were dead. My skin was going from freezing to burning so quickly that I couldn’t tell which was which. It was also the first time I had experienced what literally felt like crawling skin—not goose bumps, or a chill, or that weird shiver I would sometimes get after taking a piss. It was as if my skin had decided it wasn’t in the right place and was trying to figure out where it was supposed to go.
At the same time, I was trying to navigate my way back and forth from the bathroom through a whole new space-time continuum I didn’t understand. My trips from the bed to the bathroom every few minutes felt like a mile each way. I tried just hanging out on the toilet because, no matter how many times I puked, or shit, there was always more. When there was finally nothing left to puke up, I dry-heaved until I was so parched that I needed water. But I couldn’t keep the water down for more than a few seconds. On the few occasions that I did, it would come out in the form of diarrhea a few minutes later.
Eventually my skin, having given up on trying to find out where it should go, just crawled off my body, leaving raw flesh and exposed nerves. Everything hurt. The sheets, the pillow, my T-shirt, my underwear, and my body hair felt like steel wool against my body. Just as I had been warned, the idea of killing myself was going around in my head like a tape loop, but I couldn’t think of a single painless way to go about it.
Long Past Stopping Page 15