Problems

by Jade Sharma

  “I can get you crack.”

  “Do I look like a crackhead?” she shouted.

  “I’m just telling you what I can get,” he mumbled.

  You watch them. It’s depressing. You want to run and never touch it again. Thank your lucky stars you never got caught, not even that one time you copped on Delancey Street in broad fucking daylight with cars whizzing by.

  This little jail is made out of powder.

  There is this powder people snort or shoot into their bodies that makes them feel good, but they end up turning into zombies, lying around, wasting their lives, getting older, and doing nothing. It makes you feel so good. It is a bad sci-fi movie, and you’ve seen it how many times?

  “You can shut the door,” Elizabeth said as I walked into the bedroom.

  “Here.” She handed me a methadone pill. Thank you, Elizabeth, for being so fucking considerate. You didn’t make me have to act nice.

  “How much should I take?”

  “What’s your habit like?” she asked. The way she was wearing her reading glasses, I felt like we were at CVS, and she was the pharmacist.

  “About a bag and a half a day for the last ten days,” I told her.

  “If you want enough not to be dope sick, half is fine. If you want to get a high, then take the whole pill.”

  “Do you want money?”

  “Nah, it’s cool. They’re only three bucks a pill,” she said. Was it even a crime if you didn’t pay for it? Was the crime taking the drug or having it on you? Did New York City consider my body a container?

  Elizabeth chased the dragon, lighting it off aluminum foil. She must waste a lot that way because the smoke goes everywhere. I wondered why people didn’t use a bong or something to catch the smoke.

  Elizabeth cleaned in red heels. Give that girl a bag of dope and watch everything sparkle. As she folded her size-zero jeans, she told me Candy’s story.

  Candy lived Upstate. She and Noah had been friends when they worked at an art gallery together like ten years ago. She had gotten married, moved back home, and had two kids. Some dude had wanted to spend the rest of his life with that annoying bitch. She friended Noah on Facebook.

  Facebook: the way to ruin nice memories by having to meet up with people you should just be allowed to wonder what had happened to.

  Candy was pretty hot in a vulgar, all-American, skanky way. Blond hair, vacant eyes. She had that vibe, like you could do whatever you wanted to her. Just bend her over. Like she was used to it. Like she’d been fucked so many times she wouldn’t care if you had a turn. I kind of wished I could give off that vibe. Sometimes I tried, but it was always awkward. Something about me wasn’t easy. Whatever it was made it harder for men to forget I was a real person. Every time I fucked someone, it became complicated.

  At some point, Candy got addicted to pain pills. Her husband was leaving her. He was going to take the kids. She had to get clean. She asked Noah if he would look after her kids while she kicked if she came to the city and picked him up. And for whatever fucking reason, probably because he was high out of his mind, he agreed. Then Candy came down and put the large, simple pieces together. Noah brought her to an apartment that looked like a junkie lived there. There was a girl nodding out with an extension cord around her neck, who woke up and asked Candy if she was interested in buying an extension cord. Noah said he would be gone a few minutes but was gone for hours. There was no power. She sat in the dark and saw mice brazenly run across the counters. Noah finally came home, and she went off on him. He brought her to Elizabeth’s to calm her down. After they ate, Noah started this shit with wanting to go and get clean with her. “They just keep going back and forth about it. She’ll be like ‘I’m going by myself.’ And then Noah will be like, ‘I agreed to help you and I want to.’ Then she cries. It never ends.” Elizabeth rolled her eyes. “They won’t fucking leave.”

  “All I can imagine is babies wailing, and Noah and Candy passed out on the floor with lit cigarettes in their mouths and the stove on,” I said.

  “Men our age are giant pussies,” Elizabeth said. “I need a real man. Like an old-school dude who won’t put up with my bullshit, you know? Someone who can take control of my life.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said, pouring the dope onto a copy of The Rum Diary.

  Lying on the bed. Giggling, on our bellies, swinging our feet. We were two girls at camp. She said, “Oh, Maya, when will we be swans?”

  Elizabeth’s clavicles were pronounced. She had long dark hair. She could have been a model. Sometimes I wanted to touch her stomach because it was perfect, how flat it was. Her shirts hung flawlessly because nothing was there to push them out. Men fell in love with her. Men followed her down the street trying to guess her name, like in a movie.

  She always dated men who were losers and assholes.

  Haven’t you, haven’t you seen it all before?

  I was in love with Elizabeth. I wished we could be together, cooking, laughing, talking. I didn’t want to have sex with her. I just always wanted to be with her and to hear her laugh at my jokes and to protect her. Or I wanted her flat stomach and size-zero jeans and low-affect attitude, as if nothing could fuck with her. Elizabeth would not cry in a grocery store if her sixty-year-old boyfriend didn’t pick up her phone call. Or maybe I did want to have sex with her. Who knew.

  Elizabeth had lost her father very young. He was diagnosed with lung cancer when he was thirty-six and she was seven. In her living room, there had been a hospital bed with a machine attached to him that gave him chemo. The cancer spread to his brain. No one told him he was dying. Elizabeth’s mother told her not to tell him. The very last time she saw him, on his deathbed, he tried calling his office to tell his boss he couldn’t come in. When she hugged him, he whispered to her that he would take her to the beach for her birthday.

  After her father died, Elizabeth’s mother assumed her husband’s four brothers, who lived close by, would help out, but they didn’t even come by, let alone lend her money. She was a middle-aged woman with two kids, and she had never worked. Overnight her life resembled nothing she could have imagined. She was a widow with bills to pay. She drove Elizabeth in circles all night, crying and cursing her dead husband and his family.

  Elizabeth went to eleven different schools. Her mother-packed lunch was always the same: a small can of tuna, a plastic fork, a V8, and one of those little red balls of cheese. “I was the girl who smelled like tuna,” Elizabeth said with a smile.

  At seventeen her mother bought her a one-way ticket to Boston. In Boston she lived in a house with other runaways and drug addicts. She got a job bartending. She tried heroin for the first time. Then she made her way to New York.

  Elizabeth was always telling me her plans. She was always on the verge of getting clean. Then she would go into the bathroom, where Noah would shoot dope into her arm and her slight body would slump over, and then I would hear the obligatory toilet flush, as if anyone thought she was actually using the toilet. But she had been doing dope in secret for so long it was part of the routine.

  I used to feel good. Elizabeth used to feel nothing. She used till the money was gone. She would vomit in the toilet, pass out on the floor, wake up, and do more. She told me once, “Ever since my dad died, I don’t care about being alive.” She mixed pills and dope and drank on top of it. She wanted oblivion, she said, and death would only be a welcome side effect on the way to her goal. How her ninety-pound body could handle it all was a mystery. How she was able to maintain a job, working ten- to twelve-hour days as an editor for a magazine, was also a mystery, but it was mostly a curse. She was stuck in the cycle of making money to blow on her habit and needing dope to sustain the long hours at the office. She always was saying that if she only made this much more then everything would be fine. But she would always need more money, no matter how much she made, because that was the nature of the problem, and the problem would never be solved as long as she could make money or keep her job. There was nothing to t
hrow a wrench into the cycle, no free time to offer a moment of clarity. Where was bottom? She worked high up in a building, and then she went home to her apartment and shot all the money in her arm to feel nothing at all.

  There used to be this D.A.R.E. commercial where this woman walked in a circle and kept muttering, “I have to do drugs so I can work so I can make money so I can do drugs so I can work . . .”

  Where the fuck was bottom?

  Elizabeth thought it was bullshit that I complained about my father. “At least you had him growing up,” she said. There are no competitions for pain because no one can be objective. We all have our own private hells. Mine was a father who showed no interest in my existence. That’s a hard problem to have because the precise problem is the absence of problems.

  When I was a kid, I literally thought his name was “Dad.”

  But then I asked myself, Who would I be if my father was a great dad? What if what drove us—our sexual habits, our ambitions, our talents—all stemmed from someone not hugging us when we were kids? The best parts of us developed from overcompensating for something we weren’t given. They say ugly girls have to develop a personality. Whatever hole was made when we were kids is the same size as our ambition and need for attention. So is it better to be interesting but damaged, or mediocre but stable? At NYU there were students with parents who were so encouraging it seemed to verge on another type of abuse, giving their children unfounded confidence in anything they put their sticky hands on for five minutes. This one girl told me how her parents had her read her stories during dinner, and they would all applaud.

  My parents had thought I was an idiot. They had treated my interest in writing as a symptom of my failure to grasp reality. “You’re so smart. You could have gotten an MBA,” my mother said.

  There was a knock. Elizabeth opened the door, and Noah stuck his head in. “All right, I’m going to go get some crack. You want some?”

  “Here,” Elizabeth said, handing him a fifty.

  “My kids are everything to me,” Candy said for the millionth time. “They are the whole reason I’m alive.” Then, “You have beautiful hair.” She was so skanky. Someone should have put a cock in her mouth, if only to shut her up. But she probably wouldn’t. She would probably babble some incoherent shit even while you fucked her. I wanted to throw up.

  “I need to lie down,” I said to no one. I went back to the bedroom, crashed on the bed.

  Fuck dope. Methadone was the new frontier. Only three bucks a pill. I leaned back against the wall. Hole up in the apartment. Should just stay good and fucked up. Get real junkie skinny lying with my lovely hip bones sticking out of my dirty jeans. Some man I don’t even know yet can curve his hand into my pants. Stay wet all the time. Read all I want in my room without having to think of dumb things to say about it. When I’m king. Jump in the ocean. Let the water go up my nose, I don’t care. Drive Upstate with the windows down. Go fuck in a little tent. Pull weeds out of the ground. Drink beer. Pick at the label. Go for a drive. Park on the side of the road. Stare at the stars.

  I woke up with dried drool all over my mouth and a craving for chocolate ice cream.

  Elizabeth was lying next to me with her eyes closed, a lit cigarette between her lips. Night of the living dead. I took the cigarette and put it out.

  “It’s been real,” I said as I passed Candy taking a piss on the toilet. She gave me a Courtney Love face, half-closed eyes with a lipstick smear.

  High. Walked down the street like I had a cock. Like the city was my bitch, and I was fucking it in the ass. You’re mine, you’re mine, you’re mine.

  I walked into the front door, and it slammed behind me. The apartment was quiet and dark. I had managed to walk past a million bodegas. Big crinkly bags of kettle chips and chocolate-fudge-brownie ice cream. The only thing at home was peach yogurt.

  I went back out to the bodega. Just to look, I thought. Maybe a candy bar. Something that wouldn’t make me feel guilty. I tried hard to remember the envy I felt staring at Elizabeth’s beautiful, tiny thighs. How her body looked so perfect and clean, and mine looked sloppy and messy. I always thought I was doing okay until I spent time around her and realized I was nowhere close to being thin.

  It was smarter to buy a pint of ice cream, but I knew what started as a few spoonfuls would end with an empty pint and a sick feeling. There were granola bars with chocolate chips and peanut butter. The thought of more granola . . . I knew this was dangerous territory, and this could spiral into a need for a treat every night, then pints of ice cream every day, and it would be gross.

  I bought a Snickers ice cream bar. The chocolate broke into pieces and released the creamy vanilla ice cream. There was nougat and the swirl of caramel. The first taste was a dull sensation of sugar. At first you think, What’s all the fuss about? But then you find yourself wanting to go back and remember all the tastes: the salty nuts, the white cream, the thick caramel, the soft nougat, all mixed together. What exactly was nougat?

  They should have girls with eating disorders do commercials for food.

  I ate all but one bite and threw it in the garbage. There was a strong desire to take it right back out and finish it.

  I found my phone, but it was dead. I found a charger, but then I realized it was Peter’s. So where’s mine? All this technology, and you end up like a caveman, hunched over, trying to figure out what plugs into what.

  If I called Ogden, he would be pissed off. It pissed him off to hear about my feelings. He kept me chained a million miles from his heart, and when I cried, he thought, See, this is why I keep her chained so far away.

  He could be cold as fuck. Sometimes I cried and his eyes turned to these points of endless apathy, like, “Go ahead and fucking die.”

  Peter was too stupid to take care of me, and Ogden was too fucked-up. I would be middle-aged soon, and who in the world wanted to be with a middle-aged woman?

  I called Ogden. He didn’t pick up. The blurry images of him with another girl. A blurry girl with long brown hair and fresh white skin and tits with huge areolas. Opening her legs. I kept calling. I cried into his voicemail. I shouted into his voicemail. I sounded like a child. I sounded like someone you might not want to call back right away. Where is a good emergency when you actually need one?

  When men stop wanting to fuck you: Poof! You disappear.

  I took three Xanaxes and watched Bob’s Burgers on my laptop till I passed out on the couch.

  * * *

  “We’re going to be late,” Peter said. It was twenty past seven. We had to be at Penn Station at eight.

  “It’s not going to take forty minutes in a cab,” I said.

  “There are no cabs.”

  “There’ll be one, just wait.” The wind blew in my face. My head hurt. Why did I ever agree to go to his parents’ house for Thanksgiving? I cursed the past me, the one who hadn’t considered what the present me would have to go through.

  The past me was always fucking with the present me. Like agreeing to go jogging at nine in the morning, like agreeing to help people move, like making doctor’s appointments at eight o’clock. Thinking naively, “It will be good for me to start the day early.” But when the day finally arrived for whatever, that past me with too-high expectations for myself had totally fucked present me.

  The psychiatrist had given me Suboxone. Suboxone was the new methadone. Like methadone, it blocked dope, but Suboxone took longer to leave your system. You could see people nodding outside methadone clinics. Suboxone never did that. It didn’t give you a real high like methadone, but it was something. It felt like you had drunk an entire pot of coffee and then took some shitty speed.

  “Maya,” Peter started, but then a yellow cab with lights on turned the corner and I was saved from whatever tangent he was about to go on.

  I slid into the seat, put my headphones on, and turned up the music. It was some indie band, singing, “Everything’s a mess,” and then something about a heart, and then I couldn’t understand
the words. Peter put our bags in the trunk and slammed the door a little too hard.

  Penn Station was packed. Kids twirled around. Tired parents studied the departure board. Peter went to pick up our tickets. I stood and waited for the gate number to appear. I called Amy, my college roommate. Amy had been calling me every night since she started working the late shift. She was going to be visiting her in-laws.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey, what’s up?” she said, sounding tired.

  “I’m at Penn Station, and I don’t want to go,” I said, sweating in my big coat.

  “It will be fine.”

  “They don’t know we smoke. I’ll have to sneak around like I’m fourteen again. The sister is a Jesus freak. The brother and the brother’s girlfriend, Sue, who is hot and is studying to be a doctor . . . a fucking doctor. How do I compete with that? What do I do? I’m fat, and I do nothing.”

  “You’re working on your thesis.”

  “Amy, I’m not.”

  “They don’t know that.”

  “Amy, I’m using.”

  “When did that start?”

  “I never stopped.” I had told her I stopped. “But I stopped today. Today I’m clean.”

  “Good,” she said. “Are you anxious?”

  “I need a Xanax, and we haven’t even boarded the train.”

  “Yeah, well, pause for a moment and feel bad for me. I’m in weirdo white-trash world Upstate with Dennis.”

  “Yeah, how’s his mother?”

  “Maya, this morning I woke up, and she was sitting on the couch dipping saltines in a jar of generic mayonnaise. Watching an infomercial like it was a real show.”