Chancers

by Susan Stellin

  “I also have to sort out what I want now. I’ve spent so long setting aside what I wanted for various reasons—you, the book, making money—it’s almost become a habit not to step back and see the bigger picture….”

  As much as I wanted to support Graham with his recovery, I knew I needed to focus on my life. I was getting steady assignments, writing for magazines and The New York Times, but I’d already spent most of my book advance so I was worried about money—and I was still frustrated by the topics I was covering. During the day I’d interview people about the perks of business class travel, then after dinner I’d watch a documentary about addiction. The dissonance between my work life and my personal life was getting to be too much to manage: I finally realized that I needed help.

  In late June, I decided to keep seeing David—on my own, without Graham. He didn’t take insurance, but he gave me a break on his rate and my mom sent a check to help with the bill. I still hadn’t told her much about what was going on with Graham, but it meant a lot to me that she was trying to be supportive. I think everyone who knew me could tell I was in over my head, but I don’t think anyone knew how to help me.

  When I told Graham I was seeing David, he said he’d found his own therapist: a woman named Debi who had an office downtown. Since he’d said he couldn’t afford therapy, I was surprised that he’d changed his mind, but I took it as a positive sign. I was looking for any sign that he was willing to do whatever it took to get clean—and if he did, then the answer to my sister’s question was yes, I probably would give him another chance.

  “I can’t let go completely of this desire to see what we’d be like together if we could ever put this behind us,” I’d written in my notebook, during the flight back from Los Angeles in May.

  At the time, I didn’t really understand how much that longing kept me involved in Graham’s life, but it had as tight a grip on me as drugs did on Graham.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  August 2006

  Tulsa, Oklahoma

  In the cab from the airport to my hotel in downtown Tulsa—here on an assignment—I’m already on the lookout for places I might be able to cop. You can’t come right out and ask a stranger, “Hey, where can I buy drugs?” but I’ve gotten pretty good at landing someplace I’ve never been and managing to score within a few hours.

  Sometimes I’ll tell the driver I’m a photographer from Scotland, working on a project about drugs. I’ll be vague at first, asking about the city, which neighborhoods are safe and which aren’t, then I’ll pop the question: “Any idea where I can get a smoke?” You can tell by how the driver reacts if he’s gonna play along, maybe even hook you up. One time a cabbie in Las Vegas took me straight to his own dealer—all I had to do was give him a few rocks.

  This driver doesn’t seem to care why I’m here so I look out the window, keeping an eye out for neighborhoods that look promising. Hookers, junkies, and crackheads are a dead giveaway, and it’s easy to spot the corner boys—they’re constantly in motion, checking everyone out. But if I don’t see what I’m looking for on the way in from the airport, there’s always the concierge. You have to be careful with hotel employees—they know who you are—so I’ll usually say I’m scouting locations for a shoot and ask which parts of the city are a bit rough.

  That’s what I do as soon as I get to the hotel. The concierge seems eager to have someone to talk to, so he’s telling me all about Tulsa’s crystal meth problem and what a shame it is so many people have gotten hooked. Finally, I interrupt him and ask, “So are there any places around here I should avoid? My client is looking for an edgy setting, but I don’t want to stumble into some drug den.”

  He pulls out a map and marks a few neighborhoods with a pen. I’m out the door before he can finish giving his advice.

  As I walk closer to one of the areas he flagged—under the freeway, down by the train line—I spot a group of people hanging out where the street comes to a dead end, near a hole in a chain-link fence. Sweating and anxious, I stop for a second and look around. I’m never comfortable doing this in a place where I don’t know who I can trust, but it’s like I have a magnet inside me, pulling me through the curled-back edges of the cut metal.

  “What’s up?” asks a skinny white guy in his early twenties. He’s scraping resin from a pipe—not trying to hide what he’s doing, but his tone is a bit aggressive.

  “Who’s got?” I say, getting straight to the point.

  He checks me out, but I’m dressed a bit scruffy so I fit in with the crowd by the fence—and I’m sure I’ve got that desperate look no undercover cop can convincingly pull off.

  “See that dude over there?” he says, nodding at a guy sitting on an overturned bucket. “He’s not gonna serve you but I can hook you up.”

  “Let me try it first,” I tell him. “I don’t want to waste my money on crap.” Really, I don’t want to give him a lot of cash and watch him run off, but it’s always good to make sure you’re not buying baking soda or some toxic cut.

  “No problem. Gimme ten bucks and I’ll get you a dime. But I get a blast for fixing you up.”

  I hand over nine dollars—paying full price makes you look easy—and watch the deal go down. The guy selling glances over at me, breaks a few rocks from an eight ball, and hands them to my new friend, who hurries back. “Me first,” he says, sticking a rock in his stem and lighting up. I’m salivating just watching him, getting a bit pissed at how long he’s holding on to the pipe.

  “Alright, my turn,” I say, grabbing it and adding another rock. The minute I inhale it hits me—my ears are ringing, my heart’s racing, my whole body is tingling as waves of euphoria rush through me. The high is so intense I almost feel like I’m gonna throw up. It must show on my face ’cause when I open my eyes this kid is grinning at me like I’ve just had the best hit of my life.

  “That’s some real eighties shit,” he says. “Bet you’ll be back for more.”

  Forget coming back, I’m thinking, pulling small bills from my pockets and one of my socks. “Get me five for forty dollars—and I’ll give you another rock for your pipe.”

  “Oh, he’s a smart one,” says a woman wearing a cheap sparkly dress. “Don’t give it all away at once.”

  Once I have the crack and the pipe—which he’d totally scraped clean—the guy with the eight ball saunters up beside me. “I’m usually here or up by the Greyhound stop, near Fourth and Elgin,” he says. “Always got that good shit.”

  “Thanks, but I’m only in town for a few days. This should get me through.”

  “Well, you know where I’m at.”

  On the way back to the hotel, I pass a park with these weird sculptures—twisting metal poles with plastic laundry baskets attached to the ends. I take a picture with my phone and send it to Susan. “Rubbish,” is all I write.

  —

  THE NEXT MORNING, I take the elevator down to the hotel lobby to meet the writer. She’s in from London doing a story about the death penalty—the magazine hired me to shoot the photos. Looking at myself in the elevator mirror, I wish I’d gotten more sleep last night. My eyes are a bit bloodshot and my head feels thick and heavy.

  Today we’re going to meet a guy who helped get lethal injection passed when he was a young congressman, arguing that it was a more humane way to execute people than the electric chair. Now he’s an Anglican priest in his sixties and a very vocal opponent of the death penalty. So am I—no matter how you do it, the whole concept seems totally barbaric.

  Once we get to the church, he takes us to his quarters and tells us about his life. I shoot a few portraits of him in between the writer’s questions. He’s relaxed and doesn’t mind being photographed, which is half the battle with people you’ve just met. Sometimes I only get five minutes with someone who’s impatient about giving up any of their time.

  “Can you go stand in that corner?” I ask, trying to catch his reflection in a mirror on the opposite wall. “That’s great—just turn your body to the right and y
our head a little to the left. Okay, now look straight into the lens.”

  I shoot a couple of Polaroids, check the image, then replace the Polaroid cartridge with film. After taking some more pictures, I thank him and tell him I’m all set. I’ve done a lot of work for this magazine, so I know I’ve got what they want.

  While he finishes getting ready for the service, the writer and I find a place to sit in a pew at the back of the church. It’s one of those huge Gothic cathedrals with really high ceilings and lots of stained-glass windows. As the choir streams in—dressed in white robes, already singing—I take some photos of them lining up by the altar.

  “My mum will be happy to hear that I went to church,” I joke, picturing her heading off to church every Sunday in Scotland. But as soon as the service starts, I tune it out and let my mind wander.

  It’s strange to think that I’m in the same city where Larry Clark shot the photos in his book Tulsa: grainy black-and-white pictures of the people he did drugs with when he lived here in the 1960s. I used to spend hours looking at that book when I was at art school in London. All the photos were so different from the American kids I saw in movies growing up. But now that I’ve lived here for fourteen years, I’ve seen a lot of things that don’t match that Hollywood image.

  With the music lulling me to sleep, I have to fight hard to stay awake, so it’s a relief when the service ends and the three of us head to a bar for lunch. I can’t resist taking some pictures of the priest in his white collar with a pint in front of him, but I’ve got what I need so I leave them to finish their interview, detouring to the Greyhound station on the way back to the hotel. My stash from yesterday didn’t last as long as I’d hoped.

  As I’m walking, I’m looking for a mailbox so I can send a postcard to Susan. It’s one of those old Kodak photo postcards, but instead of printing an image on one side I left it blank and wrote on the other side: “Thinking, Smiling, Thinking, Laughing, Thinking…”

  I just want her to know I’m thinking about her, so I’m going to send her a postcard every day I’m in Tulsa. That’s mostly how we’ve been communicating this summer: email, text messages, postcards, and photos. Last week she sent me a bunch of pictures from her trip to Fire Island. In one of them she’s standing next to a street sign that says SUSAN—wearing the bikini I bought her in Hawaii. I usually like getting photos from her, but that one left me sort of gutted. It was like she was saying, “I’m all yours if you just get your shit together.”

  I hate being in limbo like this, not knowing if we’re together or apart. It’s like we’ve broken up without really going our separate ways. Part of me wants to cut it off and stop putting us both through this pain, but then this little glimmer of hope always turns into a burning desire to see her—and when I do, I know I’m not gonna be the one to walk away. But maybe she’ll finally decide to do it. Like my mum said when I told her we were taking a break: “Absence can make the heart grow fonder, but after a while it grows indifferent.”

  To be honest, I’m not really sure what Susan wants. All she’s said is that she can’t be in a relationship with me until I’ve gotten clean, but I wish she knew how fucking hard I’m trying. I quit dope a couple of months ago—on my own, no detox or rehab. It was brutal, white-knuckling it after Liam left for Scotland. That’s why I went ballistic when Susan accused me of using when we went to see Joan Didion do a reading in Central Park. I really wasn’t doing any heroin. I just took a little Xanax so I wouldn’t get too anxious, but I hadn’t been sleeping much so it really hit me. All I remember was feeling so tired I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Then when Susan nudged me awake and asked what I’d taken—in that disappointed, accusing tone—I lost it. I knew I was being a cunt, but I couldn’t stop myself. I stormed off and left her crying in the park. After going through the hell of kicking, it really pissed me off to have her doubt me.

  I wish she could see that I’m doing my best, but I feel like I’m under a microscope and every little thing I do is examined and questioned. I know I’m not perfect—I’m just trying to get better, bit by bit, and when I slip it gets thrown in my face like I’ve made no attempt whatsoever to get clean. Every explanation is treated like a lie—even if it’s the truth—or a feeble excuse that would be no big deal if someone else said it.

  That’s when I want to go back to the one thing I know will ease all the pain, and it is so fucking hard not to give in to that temptation. But I finally feel like I’m at the point where things are under control, especially now that I’m working again. I just need a little more time to kick this last habit—I couldn’t do it all at once.

  After I get back to the hotel, I watch TV, sort through my film, and smoke some crack. Not a lot—just enough to keep the craving at bay. My phone buzzes: It’s a text from Susan.

  “Found this online,” it says. “What do you get when you cross ESP with PMS?”

  Not waiting for me to guess the answer, she’s written: “A bitch who knows everything.”

  That freaks me out. She has this way of popping up when I least want her on my mind.

  I put the phone under the pillow and click the lighter a few times, waiting for that nice blue flame. The thing is, she doesn’t know everything, and I feel bad about that. But I don’t think she’d understand even if I did try to tell her.

  —

  ON MONDAY NIGHT, after hours of wandering around Tulsa’s less scenic neighborhoods, I finally decide to call Susan.

  “I was wondering what happened to you,” she says. “I’ve sent you a couple of messages but I wasn’t sure if you got them.”

  “I did, but I’ve been pretty busy since I got here. We went to church yesterday to meet with the priest—that was sort of weird, sitting there listening to his sermon—and today I’ve been running around getting ready for the shoot tomorrow. Did you get my postcards?”

  “Postcards?” Susan laughs. “You know, technology has really progressed in the last decade. You can send messages instantly now.”

  “Listen, anyone can send an email or a text message. But who else is gonna send you a postcard from Tulsa?”

  “That’s true. What’s it like?”

  “Kind of boring. We’re driving down to McAlester tomorrow so I’m trying to decide if I’m going to watch the execution. I can’t take pictures inside the prison anyway, so I don’t have to go, but I feel bad telling the writer I’m gonna skip it. I’m just not sure watching someone get killed would be good for my state of mind right now.”

  “Well, don’t do it then. You know what you can handle. Just tell her you want to focus on getting some good pictures.”

  Susan always has a practical solution—I should listen to her more often.

  “What else have you been up to?” she asks.

  “Walking around town, taking some photos, just hanging out, really…” I feel a wave of guilt looking at the remnants of crack lying on the nightstand, but I push it away. It’s always a relief when we can get through a conversation without talking about whether I’ve really quit or what I’m still using. Lately, I think Susan has been trying to be encouraging—without getting drawn into all the specifics.

  “How are things with you?” I ask, hoping to head her off before she goes there. “I got the pictures you sent from Fire Island.”

  “I thought you’d like the one I took of the ferry, with the late afternoon light reflecting off the boat. It seemed like a very Graham MacIndoe photo.”

  “Not bad, but I think there are still a few things I can teach you. Maybe you can assist me sometime—I’ve got another job when I get back to New York.”

  “That’s great,” Susan says, sounding like my parents whenever I tell them I’m working. “What’s the assignment?”

  “A portrait of Andy Murray’s coach for some tennis magazine. The editor used to live in Edinburgh so it must’ve been the Scottish connection that got me the job.”

  We talk for a while about Andy Murray—he grew up in a town near my parents—and Susan’s rec
ord when she was captain of her high school tennis team. She tells me she hated all the pressure and wished she’d played doubles instead of singles. It makes me happy that we can still talk like this, but sometimes it feels like we’re avoiding the real issue: whether our relationship has any kind of future. I’d like to think we can try again, but I don’t know if she’ll ever be able to trust me.

  After we hang up, I rummage around in my bag and pull out another Kodak photo postcard to send her. On one side I write, “Suzie, Thinking of you always. Love, Graham. Xxx.” On the other side I draw two hearts, with a line stretching between them in black pen.

  —

  WHEN THE WRITER and I pull up to the Oklahoma State Penitentiary the next day, there’s a sign that makes me want to jump out of the car. “Drug detector canines are in use at this facility,” it says. I’m wearing the same clothes I had on when I was smoking crack last night, so I’m panicking as we roll up to the checkpoint and hand over our IDs.

  “Here for the execution?” the guard asks, checking a sheet of paper for our names. “You can park in front of the visitors’ center on the left.”

  Walking toward the entrance, I’m on the lookout for dogs—they’ll sniff me out in a heartbeat, I’m thinking. But once I realize that’s probably for inmate visits, I relax a bit. The prison building is painted white, which gives it a less threatening feel. There’s razor wire all around and giant floodlights next to the guard towers, but otherwise it’s all sort of bland. I’m already wondering how I’m going to get any good photos out of this, especially since I’m not allowed to take pictures inside the prison.

  Inside there’s a media center set up, with plates of cookies and coffee on a foldout table. I read the fact sheet about the prisoner who’s about to be executed, which describes his crime in horrific detail: A handyman shows up on the doorstep of a woman he’s done work for and asks if he can borrow some money. She offers him ten dollars, he demands more and ends up stabbing her with a knife and a pair of scissors. The crime scene photos leave nothing to the imagination—her bloody body left for her husband to find. I don’t believe in the death penalty, but it’s hard to feel any compassion for someone who can do that to another human being.