by Jade Sharma
Your vision is snowy, like the reception is all fucked-up. You touch the back of your head. The blood is cartoon red.
Douglass watched the news. “It’s that knockout game. From the back you were wearing all black, so they thought you were Jewish. These young, stupid teenagers, mostly black kids, hit Jewish people in the head.”
“Shit, that’s why they ran when they saw my face.” The fact did not bring any of the relief I would have expected. It only made me think, If I were Jewish, would I be dead? What would they do to an actual Jewish person? This then led to an uncomfortable quandary. “Should we call the police?”
“I don’t know.”
I slept for the next two days, awakening only to snort a few lines. My stomach hurt. It felt like my ribs were broken, but if they truly were, I probably wouldn’t have been able to stand it. The hardest thing to deal with was how ugly and stupid people could be. My attackers were sadistic and cruel. I wasn’t a real person to them, but like an extra in Grand Theft Auto. All I could do was lie there. Sometimes I thought about taking a shower, but sitting up was a nightmare.
“You’re so lucky you’re a writer,” Elizabeth said as she lifted up a part of the floor. Like a piece of the fucking floor. One of the wood planks was cut in half, and she lifted it up. She pulled out a dusty antique box and started going through the stuff in it, putting the occasional empty bag to the side.
“I haven’t written in forever,” I said. “I don’t even think of myself as a writer.” I was thinking, How did she do that? Could I just make a hole in my floor? That was so cool.
“But you can write, you have a place where you can put everything. I don’t know where to put things. You can make something out of all the ugliness.” She looked up at me. She had tears in her eyes. “What am I supposed to do with all the shit that happens to me?”
There isn’t much you can maintain when you have to worry about scoring every day so you don’t get sick. My life was a waiting room, a TV room, and then back to a waiting room.
When you’re around other junkies, no one speaks while everyone is waiting. Come back after the dope arrives and no one can stop talking and laughing. Everyone talks excitedly about their plans, and no one talks about how addicted we all know we’ve become.
You could turn to another junkie and say, “I really need to stop.” And you will be met with a knowing nod and the words, “Yeah, me too.” Everyone always says it. Everyone probably means it.
Only one of my johns knew about my drug use. He talked to me about NA, and once when I snorted a bag in front of him, he said, “C’mon. Please don’t do that. I don’t want to take your ass to the hospital.”
There were no track marks to hide.
I got cash from dudes and then gave my cash to dudes who sold me drugs.
I wanted regulars. Every time I saw a guy, he talked about seeing me again, but I got used to not hearing back from them. I got used to never believing anyone. They wanted variety. That’s why they contacted me to begin with.
Also, I wasn’t thin and blond. I could have cleaned up if I was.
Men hate when you talk about your body. This guy Kevin said, “Shut up. I don’t care at all.”
The more money they had, and the more money they gave me, the nicer and more respectful they were.
My days continued: getting high, either going out for a date or not, either getting more drugs or not. Sometimes I read.
Sometimes it felt like there was blackness underneath everything. Like a Rothko painting, how the blackness bleeds through. Feeling everything led to nothing, and there was nothing I could do about it. Day after day of being alone and numb and fucking strangers and having cash and blowing it all, and then knowing in a day or so I’d have plenty more. It would just go on like that till my teeth fell out, till I didn’t even have the strength to pull myself out of it. No kids, no family, me alone except for the growing terror my dreams weren’t in the future but somewhere far behind me. I had to figure something out, because I knew this couldn’t last forever—but whatever, if I didn’t get a bag today, it would be fucking horrible, so I got another bag. I needed a break just from thinking about it.
One more day, and then I’ll stop. Wait, I should taper down a little. Wait, I need to get Xanax first. Wait, I have a date in two days, so why shouldn’t I use a little longer to make a lot more money? Always thinking, One last big score. Go out with a bang.
* * *
I didn’t mean to kill myself, but nobody believes me. I did a lot of dope, but not more than I’d ever done before. Maybe it was the Xanax on top of the dope and the not eating or sleeping. I never would have thought Douglass would call 911 on me, so I must have scared him.
I come to vomiting white shit on the floor of the living room. Then the ambulance shows up, and I try to tell everyone I’m really okay, but once I’m in the ambulance, the EMT leans in and says, “My advice to you is if you really want to get home, act normal.” She says this with an air of confidentiality, like she is relaying a secret code. I take the advice to heart and go with it.
I fool the doctor. He asks me about the nasty black shit they make me drink that has the consistency of paint, and I joke about why they don’t sell it in vending machines. I think, What would a person who isn’t suicidal do in this situation? Obviously, a normal person would go crazy, asking questions about why they couldn’t go home, but so would someone trying to get home to off themselves, so playing “normal” means I’m not even freaked out because I know I didn’t do anything wrong, and so I’m just going to be chill and joke around. It’s the fat, annoying nurse who sees through me. “What happened? So were you trying to hurt yourself?”
I don’t know how the laws work, but I’m pretty sure the doctor isn’t going to call the cops if I tell him I do dope. But I don’t. I tell him I have anxiety attacks and took more Xanax than I should have, and also I drank some wine. I don’t know if they will test me and figure out the truth. The nurse looks at me like she doesn’t believe a word I’m saying.
The nurse is a short-haired, bitchy cunt. How can you work in health care and be on your feet all day and still be that fat? How much does this woman eat?
The nurse seems suspicious, and I’m pretty sure that even if it was an accident, she would still be suspicious. She knows there’s more to the story.
I overhear the doctor and the nurse discussing me. The doctor sounds pretty sure it was an accident. The nurse is adamant it wasn’t. The doctor compromises; they will put me on a normal ward (instead of the loony bin) but keep me for observation.
This is not good for a number of reasons. The most immediate one is I am starting to get dope sick. Maybe it’s just knowing I will be dope sick, since it hasn’t been that long since I used. But it will happen, and the anxiety makes me feel queasy and desperate. Douglass needs to get in a cab and go back home and get my shit and then bring it back before they move me to a room. I can’t find my phone. I don’t want to appear too anxious. When I ask about it, the nurse says I’ll get a phone once a bed opens up. When will that be? She doesn’t know. Can I just have my phone back? She says she’ll try. She won’t try.
Hospitals are full of people trying to help people. There is not one person who can help you.
Can I just walk out? I decide to give it a shot. But then the curtain opens, and they are taking my blood.
“I have to pee.”
“This will only take a second.” The woman is already putting the rubber thing around my arm, pinching the fuck out of my skin when she twists it.
“Fuck.”
I normally look away, but this time I look right at the horror-movie-huge needle as it spikes into my vein. I sneeze. And then sneeze again. She tells me to sit still. I can’t. I am in the middle of a hospital and am sick and nobody can help me.
When she’s gone, I leave. I found my clothes under my bed, so the plan is to transform from patient to visitor. I walk past the dying people. Wives and husbands. A smattering of lonely old
people. There is a gay couple. The dude looks like a poster for AIDS. Weird how AIDS seems kind of retro now—even diseases have a golden age, a prime, and then they seem played out. How annoying to get AIDS now, feeling like a song people remember being on the radio a lot but have since forgotten completely. His lover is holding his hand and whispering to him. All the other waiting people sit around like they’ve done this a million times before.
I don’t get far. I stick to my story of how I’m feeling fine now, and so I wanted to go out just for a smoke, but the nurse goes and tattles on me to the doctor, and he is not entirely positive I wasn’t trying to flee.
Over the following days I undergo a horrible, nasty withdrawal in the hospital. But finally they get ahold of my shrink, who tells them I need to be on Suboxone. At last, some relief. I sleep. The shrink also okays clonazepam, and they are generous with it. Then there’s talk about where I’m going to go. My mother and Raj are there. I don’t know when they came. I don’t even know what the conversation is. I’m too out of it to stay awake longer than forty-five minutes. There is a twenty-four-hour period when I am almost asleep the entire time. Then there is a twenty-four-hour period where I can’t sleep at all, and I have no visitors. I try to watch the television, but it’s only loud enough to be annoying.
I can’t focus but feel alert. The nightmare withdrawal symptoms are pretty much behind me. It’s plausible I could be clean. I call my mother. She doesn’t believe me. She says she’s tired and doesn’t know what to do. I get angry. She thinks it’s reasonable I tried to kill myself, or at least stupidly OD’d. “I know you were taking . . .” She doesn’t finish the sentence. Like there’s a word that can’t be spoken aloud. She won’t say it. Which is weird, because she always has something to say.
I end up on a plane with my mother and brother. I keep thinking, Sound normal. But I can tell by the worry on their faces that I’ve scared the shit out of them. My mother tries to figure out where I’m getting the dope. She doesn’t know Douglass has been staying with me. Thank god he was gone when they went back to the apartment before I was discharged.
There are thirty-four texts. Johns. Money.
It is so hard to know money is waiting for you, a lot of money, and every single problem you currently have—feeling like shit, wanting to die, guilt, anger, resentment, feeling soft, feeling vulnerable—could all disappear easily, and you really would be completely fine.
You try to stick with this thought process, but you know eventually you will feel this way again. You will be in this same exact position only more time will have passed, and so it’s better just to clean up now.
A small voice says, “You won’t ever get high again?”
Another voice says, “No, one day. Like in six months, it will be okay to do a few bags, and your tolerance will be so shitty you will feel incredible.”
And then another voice says, “It’s time. Just fucking stop it. You are too old for this to be cute.” I try to hold on to that. I am a former drug addict. Oh god, that sounds terrible.
I’m actually clean. The Suboxone is helping me along.
The place they put me in is like a prison with carpeting. There is a door you have to punch a code into to leave.
I scream at my mother, “How can you fucking leave me here?” She just cries. She says she doesn’t know what to do anymore. “So you just fucking lock me up? I have rights.” I didn’t know that my shrink and my mother had conspired when I was in the hospital in New York.
Here, kid, this is what you did with the life that was given to you.
I cry a lot. I think about how Peter would have visited if we were still together. My mother annoys me with her questions, and my brother is eager to get back home. He’s annoyed I do whatever I want, and he has to take time out of his life to deal with my shit. Like I had asked him to come. “Here, deal with my shit.”
Glad-Ass, the head of the useless nurses, says my roommate will be in soon. I ask if she can leave me alone for a while, but she says I’m on twenty-four-hour watch. She follows me to the bathroom and looks directly at me when I pull down my pants and go. She takes me to the rec room, which is just one big room with a couch and a big table, the kind they have at preschools, and a TV and a Ping-Pong table. The whole place feels like an after-school recreation center.
My roommate’s name is Keisha. She’s twenty-five years old but looks almost forty. She’s fat and wears a scarf over her head and sucks on a lollipop.
Keisha’s mom is on crack. I know this because Keisha said, “My mom is on crack.”
I can no longer cry. The drugs must be working.
Keisha says this place is all right, better than a lot of other places. I tell her I like her beaded bracelet around her ankle, and she says she’d make me one.
I lie there in the dark. If sleep ever happens to me again, it will feel like a small miracle. Keisha is snoring. I prop my leg up against the wall and run my hand through the bars of light that fall on the wall. I wonder how long I’ll be here, and then my body starts itching inside for a cigarette. I grind my teeth and turn over a couple times, feeling like I want to beat the shit out of somebody. There are places where they let you smoke, but this is not one of those places. I get up and walk over to the nurses’ station and say I can’t sleep. The woman behind the counter has a fat, friendly face—like a waitress in a diner who you think probably spends all her time in the back eating banana splits—and she gives me two pills, and I swallow them without asking what they are.
I lie in bed and start to cry again. Where the fuck is bottom? Is this finally it? I miss Peter’s sleeping body. My head is a dusty room cluttered with sad, broken things from another time. I remember our first year, when I would make dinner for him like a good wife. When I would rush around making sure the apartment was clean, and he would come home tired and shitty. He would kiss me on the cheek and stuff his face and tell me how great dinner was.
Does Peter know I am in here? Do I even want him to? Would he think, Of course she’s in the loony bin. Of course I’m glad I’m not with her anymore. He is out there in the world having fun. He is out there in the world, and whatever he does is no longer my business.
I miss being someone’s wife. I am divorced, a failure, a reject. Someone had picked me and then thought, Whoops, this isn’t the one I want. I had been given a million chances, and I was cavalier with all of them.
If you’re the woman, you’re the one who everyone pities. The one everyone secretly thinks is the failure.
When I wake up, I open the drawers and find all my stuff is gone. I look for my shoes that were right next to the door, and they’re gone too, so I walk up to the nurses’ station. Glad-Ass won’t talk to me till I’m on the other side of a fat white piece of tape. I get behind the tape and tell her all my stuff is gone. And she tells me, in this tone like she’s already said it at least a million times, I’ll get my stuff back when I earn it. I tell her I don’t understand. She says I’ll get points for following rules; little by little, I’ll get all my stuff back. I nod, thinking, These people are fucking nuts.
They treat you like you are five years old. You are being told what to do by people who are obviously stupid.
Doesn’t being here confirm what I always knew deep down? What everyone always knew? I am batshit crazy.
There’s a point system. You get points for finishing your food. You get points for participating in therapy. You get points for making art in art therapy. When you get a certain amount of points, you get to make a phone call. When you get a certain amount of points, you get to check out certain things from your own stuff to use during free time.
The windows are tinted, and it always looks gray outside.
In the mornings, they fill us with sugar. Three fluffy brown pancakes we drown in syrup and slather with globs of butter, falling apart all hot in our mouths. Then we drink thick whole milk that clings to our bellies like cream. Then there are glazed donuts and Lucky Charms and Frosted Flakes. I eat two of the pan
cakes, but soon my stomach feels like it’s sticking together, with the milk holding it down like lead. Keisha stacks her pancakes and makes sure they are lined up perfectly around the edges. I watch the little hairs, all sticky and shiny, on her pretty lip.
We’re not allowed to have razors, or anything with caffeine, or candy, drugs, or gum. If we are caught with any of these things, we will be punished.
All the girls’ legs are so hairy. I touch the fur on my own and wonder how thick it’s going to get, and how nice it’s going to be when I finally get to shave it, watching the long, soft hairs fall away and leading the razor up, making a path through the forest of hair.