Long Past Stopping

by Oran Canfield

  I had bought a syringe and a couple of balloons on my way home, and I knew I had a spoon still hidden down in the basement somewhere. This time I emptied the little bag of coke into it as well and cooked it up with some bottled water I had taken from the rehab. As antsy as I was, I was still afraid of injecting cocaine and decided that, just in case I had a heart attack or something, I should do it out by the stairs. That way someone would find me quicker than if I did it inside the studio. Nervous with anticipation, I put the needle in my arm and pushed down on the plunger.

  My first thought as I clutched at my chest and fell to my knees was that I had done too much. I could taste the cocaine as my heart, which felt as if it wanted to jump out of my chest, pumped the shit through my body. The euphoria was so overpowering that I could no longer connect to any sense of fear. When the initial rush subsided, I found myself on all fours with my hands and knees in a puddle of vomit. As soon as I caught my breath and managed to stand up, I fixed myself another shot without any hesitation. Then another. Too afraid to retrieve the coke from my room and risk being seen by my housemates, I snuck outside and spent the remainder of my sixty dollars and injected those. Eventually I fell asleep in my recording studio, which because I had the foresight to seal it up with plastic, had made it through the shit storm unscathed.

  After that night, there was no such thing as essential recording gear. The only thing that mattered was that I fall down, clutch at my heart, and vomit. I kept pretending to myself and everyone else that I was fine, but the charade was wearing thin. I was losing weight rapidly—punching out new holes in my belt every couple of weeks—as well as my sanity, from a combination of too many drugs, too much lying, and an inability to remember what lies I told which people. My roommates, who were dismayed that I had left rehab again, must have known what was going on, but there wasn’t much they could do.

  The thing about cocaine is that in the beginning of a run, five or ten bucks’ worth would make me fall to my knees and puke, but six days later I could be spending up to five hundred dollars a day, shooting up every five minutes just to stay awake. I had to stay awake to peek out of the keyhole in my door and record the conversations of my roommates plotting to catch me using. I could hear them talking about it all the time, but my tape recorder wasn’t able to pick it up for some reason.

  I became so paranoid that I only left the house when absolutely necessary. To sell more shit, to buy more drugs, and occasionally to work some random job to get money to buy more drugs. When I did run into people, I tried my best to convince them that I was just stressed out from dealing with the flood, the lawsuit, my breakup with Heather—anything but the truth.

  A FEW PEOPLE WHO weren’t fully aware of what was going on took pity on me and gave me random jobs here and there. I restored pianos for a guy in Oakland, and bar-backed at a couple of neighborhood establishments. I even took a job at a leather-goods factory, making cock rings and dildo harnesses, which turned out to be dangerous work for a junkie. My job was to feed leather strips into an industrial sewing machine, cut the strips into eight-inch sections, attach some buttons, and voilà…a cock ring.

  Making a hundred of these a day was monotonous work, and it was easy to nod off, especially when I was sewing. Usually I woke up right before my hand reached the needle, but when I woke up and saw three Mexican women looking at me in horror, I knew I was in trouble. I couldn’t feel a thing, but when I looked at the machine, I saw that my thumb had gone right through the double-stitcher and had been sewn onto a strip of leather that was only two steps away from becoming a cock ring. I was bleeding profusely, and even though I didn’t feel it, I knew it was supposed to hurt. I put on a show of tremendous pain while one of the women ran to go get help. My boss was able to stop the bleeding with some bandages, but if I had nodded off while stamping out patterns for the dildo harnesses, that machine might have taken my hand.

  None of these jobs were able to support my habit, so in the hopes of stretching my money a little further, I got on methadone and started buying crack instead of powder cocaine.

  Someone on the street had told me you could inject crack by breaking it down in lemon juice. He was right, but it was a ten-minute process, and ten minutes was sometimes too long—long enough to fall asleep and wake up eighteen hours later with the pattern from my computer keyboard pressed into my face. So I started smoking a little of it while I waited for the rest to dissolve. Then I started smoking it all the time and spent even more money. I hardly ever had problems with buying heroin, but the crack dealers were not to be trusted. They were always selling me bits of soap, drywall, even cat litter. Those guys had no fucking morals.

  MOST OF MY FRIENDS had stopped talking to me at this point. It started with Jibz after I agreed to record our band, the Roofies, and got her to pay me in advance. I planned to use the money to get my tape machine out of the pawnshop, but it never happened. I spent it on drugs, and when it came time to record, there was nothing to record with. The studio had dwindled down to almost nothing. I tried to tell her, Eli, and the rest of the band I was sorry and I would pay them back, but that wasn’t enough for them. Jibz decided that unless I agreed to pay them back and get random drug tests, they were going to kick me out of the band. It surprised me, as I never really cared too much about that band anyway. I told them to fuck off, and stormed out, strangely relieved that I had one less obligation to think about.

  A week later, before Optimist International practice, Eli surprised me as I was coming out of the bathroom after shooting a particularly good speedball. My tolerance was so high that really getting a good shot was rare, and this was a rare one. My heart was still beating like crazy as Eli asked me, “Were you shooting up in there?”

  “No. I was taking a shit,” I answered with as straight a face as possible. Taking shits had become very rare as well, which was an unfortunate side effect of heroin.

  “I just don’t know what to believe anymore. I could have sworn you were using again, but then whenever I talk to you, you do a good job of convincing me that I’m wrong,” he said. I was kind of proud of myself for being that convincing moments after puking into the toilet, but Eli continued. “So I’ve decided that since you’re such a good liar, I just can’t talk to you at all anymore.”

  His words stung, but I was still trying to combat the rush from the cocaine and couldn’t come up with an argument against his line of reasoning. I had to concede that it made a certain amount of sense.

  “Okay. Do you mind telling Sean?” I asked him as if it were no big deal. I wanted to get out of there before I started crying. This band was important to me, and Eli and Sean were important to me. Normally I would have argued or apologized, and tried to convince him I was fine, but I didn’t have it in me. I left him in the kitchen and walked to my room without any obligations left.

  ELI MUST HAVE told my last two close friends, Jake and Betsy, that he thought I was using again, because that night they staged a last-ditch intervention. They suggested that I accept that I was a junkie but, instead of quitting, I just try to cut down to a reasonable amount, get my life back on track, and try not to beat myself up so much about the whole thing. It sounded like a good idea to me, and I agreed that I would give it a shot, which made it all the more confusing at five that morning, when I found myself on Jake’s roof, clearly planning on breaking into his house. I tried to tell myself to stop. I had twenty bucks in my pocket, the pawnshops opened in three hours, and I still had that Fender Champ I could sell. But it was as if I were watching one of those shitty teen horror movies where you’re yelling at the screen, telling the girl not to go down to the basement, but there’s nothing you can do. Just like that poor girl, I couldn’t yell at myself loudly enough to turn around as I watched myself bend the security bars and squeeze my hundred-and-twenty-pound body through the window.

  I looked around and noticed a bunch of sleeping bags scattered around the floor and saw Jake’s sister looking up at me from one of them. Without answering
her, I walked straight to the front door and let myself back out. What the hell had I been thinking?

  Once again I woke up with people in my fucking room. Jake and Mick were standing in my doorway. Jake started by asking me if I had broken into his house the night before.

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “Okay, buddy,” he said. “I hate the fact that I’m doing this, but I already filed a police report, and if you don’t leave town in one week, I’m pressing charges.”

  I could see Mick fuming. As soon as Jake was done, he exploded. “One week? Fuck that! Where’s my camcorder, motherfucker? You’re getting the fuck out of here right now, you lying, stealing piece of shit. Get up, motherfucker! I’ll teach you to fucking steal from me, you piece of shit.”

  I had come across Mick’s camcorder a few weeks earlier while I was in his room looking for records to sell. I figured I could pawn it and get it back to him before he ever noticed it was missing. In a terrible twist of fate, he looked for the fucking thing that same night. So far, I had spent at least two hours helping Mick look for his camcorder while telling him, “It’s got to be here someplace. Are you sure it’s not in your room?” At least I’d managed to get it back from the pawnshop a couple days earlier. My hope was that he would find the camcorder behind his records, and think he misplaced it, but unfortunately it hadn’t worked out that way.

  “Get up, motherfucker!” he kept yelling at me. “You’re out of here!”

  Jake tried to diffuse the situation by convincing Mick to leave me alone for a minute and let him talk to me. I was in shock. Everything had come to a head, and I couldn’t see any way out of it, especially with Mick out in the hall still yelling at me.

  I got up, told Jake I was sorry, and then led the way to Mick’s room. I showed him where the camcorder was, but it didn’t stop him from yelling at me. All I could do was hang my head in shame, as I walked out the door to spend my last twenty bucks in the hopes of getting at least another few hours of not giving a shit before I started thinking about what the fuck I was going to do.

  Mick followed me all the way to the street, screaming “You’re out of here, motherfucker!”

  I came back to the house ten minutes later, and my key didn’t work. There was no way they could have changed the lock that quickly. I pounded on the windows to no avail, and realized they must have done it while I had been asleep. Someone has to come out eventually, I’ll just jam my foot in the door and force my fucking way in, I thought as I paced back and forth, starting to feel sick. It was a bad situation, but I couldn’t blame them for changing the locks on me. I deserved it. All the same, I was standing on the street shivering and I needed to get into the fucking house. I decided to call the cops, tell them the truth, and see if there were any legal rights I could take advantage of.

  “Your name’s on the lease?” the emergency operator asked me.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Okay. Just sit tight and I’ll have a car there in two minutes,” she said, hanging up.

  It didn’t even take two minutes. The police car was pulling up pretty much at the same time I hung up the phone. I couldn’t count how many times I had called the cops to report a fight or someone passed out in front of our door, even a drive-by, where the bullet had literally ended up in a brick wall six inches from my head. Most of the time, it would take them up to forty-five minutes to show up, if at all.

  “You the guy who called?” the cop asked me as I approached the car.

  I nodded to him.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Well…” I hesitated. “Let me be honest. I’ve been having a problem with heroin, my roommates have noticed some of their stuff has gone missing, and I just came back to the house to find the lock has been changed.”

  “You’ve been stealing your roommates’ stuff?” he asked me. I nodded again. “Okay, we’ll take it from here,” he said as he and his partner walked over to the door.

  “This is the police! Open up!” they said while pounding their Maglites on the piece of plywood we had used to replace one of the windowpanes. There was no movement in the house. I peeked through the crack and could see them standing back by the kitchen.

  The cop had a look through the door, too, and yelled, “Hey. You with the blond hair. I can see you. Open up now.”

  That got Mick to come to the door.

  “Listen,” the cop said after hearing Mick’s side of the story. “Nobody wants to live with a junkie, but the law is the law. His name’s on the lease, and yours isn’t. If you don’t like it, the only thing you can do is move out. Now give me a copy of the key.” The cop went to the door, tried the key, and handed it to me.

  “You should really stop using that stuff,” he told me on his way out.

  BEFORE GOING back to my room to get high, I apologized to Mick and told him I would be gone soon. He just ignored me. I didn’t know where I was going to go. The only solution I could come up with was to call my friend Aaron and see if I could kick on his couch. Our friendship had gone through many ups and downs since we had been roommates at boarding school, but I could always count on him if I was in trouble. Going to Aaron’s house didn’t fulfill Jake’s requirement of getting out of town, but it was all I could come up with.

  As always, I was determined to really clean up my act. Then I found a few thousand dollars lying on Aaron’s dresser the next day. It was money he had been saving for a trip to Thailand, but I figured he wouldn’t miss two hundred bucks.

  “Why does it look like someone’s been rifling through my shit?” he asked me when he got home from work.

  “I don’t know.” I was laid out on his couch pretending to be sick.

  “How much money did you take?” he asked, ignoring my answer. I gave up the act of being sick and told him I took two hundred bucks.

  “It seems like it was more than that,” he said.

  “Man. I swear I just took two hundred. Count it.”

  “I would, but I don’t know exactly how much was there. Come on, let’s go.”

  “Where are we going?” I asked him.

  “I don’t know. I’ll take you anywhere you want to go, but you better figure it out soon.”

  First he gave me a ride home. I packed a bag and gave him my Fender amp—which I never got the chance to sell—as collateral for the money I stole. From there, he drove me all the way to Santa Cruz to a rehab our friend Sam had just successfully completed. By now I had absolutely no faith that it would work for me, but what the fuck else was I going to do?

  seventeen

  In which a journey to the outlands finds our protagonist in the back of a cop car sniffing a curious white powder

  ONE OF THE MAIN selling points of my new boarding school in Arizona was its field trips program. The program offered trips to the Hopi and Navajo Indian reservations, to Baja, California, or to work with charity organizations in Tucson, but freshmen were required to go on the Mexico trip. We drove to a small town in northern Mexico, and I was dropped off in front of an adobe hut that I was told I would be staying at for the next three weeks. I said my good-byes to the remaining kids in the van and watched them drive away on the dirt road, sending up a cloud of dust. My heart sank at the sight of it. I didn’t really know any Spanish and my host, a middle-aged man named Oscar, didn’t speak much English. I picked up my bags and made a gesture to imply that I wanted to bring them inside, but he made a motion that I interpreted as “wait.”

  “¿Donde está el baño?” I asked him. He motioned for me to leave my bags where they were and led me behind the hut to an outhouse. A woman out back was carrying water buckets from a well, up a ladder, and finally to a large metal tank on the roof of the hut.

  “Mi esposa,” he said. “The water is for la ducha.”

  I shrugged my shoulders to indicate that I had no idea what he was talking about. He ran his hands through his hair and pantomimed rubbing soap over his body.

  “Ah. A shower,” I said.

  “Sí. Show
ard,” he repeated to himself.

  I held my breath before going into the outhouse. When I came out, the woman was lighting up a pile of wood under the tank to heat up the water.

  “Showard!” Oscar yelled to his wife as we walked back to the front door.

  Again I picked up my bags to bring them inside, and again he motioned for me to leave them. When we entered the house, I understood why. Oscar introduced me to his two kids, his parents, and his wife’s parents, all of whom were living in the one-room hut. How the fuck did this place get approved by the school if there was no place for me to stay? The four old folks were making eye movements toward a free chair, so I sat down. We just sat there and stared at one another while Oscar’s wife, who had come back in, hung a sheet in front of a raised platform covered with a piece of sheet metal.

  “Showard,” Oscar said again before disappearing behind the sheet. His wife left the house again. I just sat there absorbed in my discomfort, wishing I had followed the school’s advice to cut off my dreadlocks, while these four ancient Mexicans studied me in silence. I was jarred out of it by Oscar yelling “Ahora!” at the top of his lungs. That was followed by the sound of water hitting sheet metal. When he yelled, “Bien!” the water stopped. A few minutes later the same routine was repeated.

  When he was dressed, I followed him outside and up to the roof, where he opened and closed the water tank for his wife and then the kids. I was dreading the prospect of having to go through this production myself, and I was still totally confused as to why my bags were still out on the front porch. After about five attempts, I succeeded in asking him where I would be staying.

  “My nephew, he take care of you. But don’t tell him the money.”

  “What money?” I asked.

  “From la escuela. I says to him I brought you here so I could speak the inglés. ¿Sí? You speak the Espanish, and I speak the inglés, yes?”