by Bill Clegg
Wednesday becomes Thursday. Five bags become three. The lighter, bent down at an angle too far and for too long, pops, and its metal workings explode apart in my hand. It is the last lighter and it’s now evening again. I scan a few drawers and pockets and find no more and realize I have to go out. I pour a vodka and look around at the apartment filled with glasses jammed with cigarette butts the Asian guys must have smoked. There are used condoms on the floor, a sheet nailed to the wall above the terrace door to block anyone seeing in, and empty beer cans and vodka bottles everywhere. The gloom of the wrecked room and the grim image of three strangers drugging and drinking and slamming into each other to create closeness or apartness or whatever each of us is running to or toward is too much to bear. And there is nothing new about it. It’s like every other time getting high. And here I am again. I look at the terrace door. I look at the bags of drugs on the coffee table and think: Is there enough to get me on the other side? Is there enough to finish what I started two months ago? There’s only one way to find out, I decide, as I put on my shoes to go get lighters.
Like every other time I’ve left a room with drugs, I worry it will be raided, and more than the fear of being arrested, I panic at the idea that the drugs will be seized, taken away, not used. So I tuck the bags in the front pocket of my shorts, put on a clean T-shirt, wash my hands to clear off the soot, and leave. The elevator man, the older of the two Serbian brothers who work the elevator in the building, mumbles something inaudible. I pray he can’t smell the smoke I’ve been breathing for nearly forty-eight hours. I leave the building and immediately wish I hadn’t. The sidewalks along Seventh Avenue are teeming with people. Cars streak by, sirens sound, voices come from all directions. I don’t want to be here, but I need lighters and have no choice. I get to the bodega and ask for ten lighters, more than I need but I’m fearful I’ll run out again. Once I have them in my pockets I walk back to Seventh Avenue, head south, and before I’ve turned onto 15th Street, I see him. Asa.
How he persuades me to come to his apartment I have no idea. I’m standing in his small studio living room listening to him talk to his sponsor, Lucy. I hear him say the word Benadryl and I can’t imagine why. I go to the bathroom and run the water and flush the toilet while I draw as big a hit as I can. Immediately he comes knocking on the door. I pack another hit, light it, and exhale as I scramble unsuccessfully to find a window to open. The little room is dense with smoke, and when I open the door the drug clouds pour into the apartment like steam. Asa is calm and not confrontational but he asks me, gently, if I will give him the drugs. I say I should probably leave, but as I do I think I hear heavy footfalls outside his door. One part of me is aware that I am becoming paranoid, as I always do on drugs, and the other remembers the Asian guys who seemed to be communicating with each other last night in an intricate code of winks and hand signals. And then the shadows on the terrace that looked like men with bulletproof vests.
Asa has a box of Benadryl in his hand and says that Lucy suggests I take a few to kill the edge, soften the high, and help bring me down a little so I can decide what to do. This sounds good, so I ask for three and I swallow them down. I ask if he has alcohol in the house, and as I do I remember how we know each other—from the rooms—and I apologize. But I know that I need alcohol and I need it soon. I need to go to the bathroom, I say, and he seems genuinely stumped, so he turns his back and starts talking again to Lucy. I disappear into the bathroom and load up the stem a few more times. I feel a notch calmer as the hits push away some of the worry, but in its place comes something else. That old restless sexual energy that this drug unleashes. So I go back out to where Asa is and say I’m getting warm. I ask him if it’s OK if I take my T-shirt off and he just sort of blinks and says, I guess so. I’m feeling a bit bolder now than before, so after my shirt is off I pull out a stem and pack it in front of him and draw a hit. I exhale into the neat, attractive little studio. I pull a chair directly in front of where he’s sitting on the couch and lean back and put my hands in my pockets. I push my shorts down my hips a little and flex my arms and think that something is about to happen. In the deluding inner sheen of the high, I think there’s no way he won’t be game to fool around. I’ve had a sense he may have a crush on me and by God if he does, here I am. It seems completely logical, and Asa the friend, the saving angel, the sober comrade disappears and in his place is just a beautiful nearby body that looks like the next place to go in my crack-mapped journey. He hands me another Benadryl and asks me again if he can take the drugs from me. Again, he’s calm, not angry or pushy. But I can barely hear him for all my desire. He stays on the phone with Lucy and says to me, You can stop now. You can stop and you can crash here and everything will be OK. This doesn’t have to get any worse than it already is.
Something in his tone strikes a nerve. What if this could be over? I think, and then remember the terrace off my apartment, the seventeen floors down to the asphalt of 15th Street. A few hours ago, that was the only way I could see to end this. Now here’s Asa offering another way. But that way—the meetings and the diners and the phone calls and the sponsor and the off-limits trigger zones all over the city—that way is not working. Here I am with my shirt off, two and a half bags away from smoking a thousand dollars’ worth of crack, hitting on and trying to relapse someone who has only extended to me kindness and patience and time. I am doing everything I can to seduce him into the very oblivion that nearly destroyed him years ago. Asa asks me where I got the money for the drugs and I tell him about the pile of silver but I don’t tell him it was my mother’s. Some alchemy of Benadryl, the mention of the silver, and Asa’s patient tones spook the sexual weather away.
Confused and desperate for another hit, I tell Asa I need to take a shower. He gets me a towel, asks me not to smoke the drugs in the bathroom, which I agree to, and then, once the water is running, pack a fresh hit and try to force enough smoke into my system so I can figure out what to do. The water pipes creak as I turn up the hot water and through that noise I soon hear another noise—voices, men’s voices, coming from the other side of the wall. Are they in the hallway? The next apartment? The dread of being under surveillance that has come in and out like a tide over the last forty-eight hours shows up again, suddenly and full force. There are voices coming from behind two walls now. I hear Let’s get him and Why are we waiting? and I turn off the water to listen closely. Asa’s at the door and says, OK, that’s enough, come on out. And then I think: He’s in on it. These guys, whoever they are, are with him. I scramble into my clothes, flush the toilet, and take another hit with what’s left of the third bag. Thinking there may be drug agents and police on the other side of the door, I hide the last two bags, lighter, and stem in the medicine cabinet. I’ll say it’s Asa’s, I think diabolically, pulling the cabinet door shut and confronting in the mirror what would be obvious to anyone: a desperate addict. Asa knocks, and his careful voice comes from the other side.
In a cramped, smoke-filled studio bathroom in Chelsea, one of three things is about to happen: arrest, returning home to a seventeen-story exit from everything, or giving the drugs to Asa and trusting that what he’s saying is true. That I’ll be OK. That this is just a stumble and not a fall. I look in the mirror again and see what I always see when I’m high: my eyes, dead and black and staring back as if they were someone or something else’s eyes and not my own. I sway before the mirror and begin to feel the Benadryl crawl underneath the drugs and link hands with the sleepless hours of the nights before. I step to the door and open it. On the other side it’s Asa, alone, no one else, no men in bulletproof vests wielding guns and handcuffs. I decide to give up. I know if I do, there will be no more voices on the other side of the wall. At least for now.
___
My eleven days become one and Polly’s one becomes four. The eight grand becomes six and the messages on my phone are too many to count. June’s rent is due in two weeks. After June is paid there will be $3,500 left in the account with four week
s until July’s rent is due. How did I go from having nearly four months’ rent covered to barely two? I know, I just don’t want to remember. But as much as I try, the last three days keep flickering to life. The Asian guys I picked up off the street, got high with, and threw out. Which night was that? Tuesday? Wednesday? It’s not clear. The voices behind the bathroom wall at Asa’s. Asa. Taking my shirt off and trying to seduce him. And then the final deal he and I strike: that I’ll give him the drugs if he allows me to smoke one more hit, which I do, in a chair, in front of him, while he sits on the couch and watches, cell phone and sponsor pressed to his ear. I give him the remaining bags and watch him flush them down the toilet. Watch him smash the stem and flush the glass. Afterward, Asa walks me home and spends the rest of the night on my couch. We wake up late the next morning, and after I feed Benny, he walks me to the corner of Fifth and 10th Street so I can go to the 12:30 meeting at The Library. He rushes to class, and I promise I’ll see him at the two o’clock meeting.
I can’t bear the idea of walking into The Library and counting one day, so I circle the block a few times. My mother keeps calling, and I wonder if she knows that I’ve relapsed again. I have not yet listened to any of the messages. I call Jack and tell him what’s happened. He sounds tired when he tells me to go to meetings all day and raise my hand. The rest can wait. Eventually, but not now, I will call Kim and Dave and Jean and Polly and Luke and everyone else who I suspect has left messages and who will have to decide whether to stick with me or step away.
I go to the meeting, but since I wait until the last possible moment to enter the building, by the time I get to the fifth floor the place is packed and it takes a long, uncomfortable minute to find a seat. Looking through the crowded room I don’t see anyone I know. I then see Pam, who motions toward the far back wall where there is an empty seat. It’s next to Annie, someone I met just a few days before. She’s the one I saw that first day at The Library and was convinced I’d met somewhere before. At first I thought she was the girlfriend of Noah’s screenwriting partner, but a week later, when I gathered enough courage to say hello, it turned out we’d never met. She has a little more time than I have and is, like me, not working and doing nothing else but getting sober. She’s recently completed a two-year MFA program in acting, but she went on a bender two nights before her showcase performance, where the school invites agents and managers. Her acting partner had to go on with one of the professors reading from a script, and because the showcase is one of the requirements for getting a degree, she has not yet officially graduated. There was a messy period that followed the showcase disaster before she found her way into the rooms.
___
Hey, lambchop, she whispers as I sit down. Annie is wearing, as usual, a thrift store ensemble of Rickie Lee Jones–style beret, a big-plastic-buttoned purple cardigan sweater, and denim overalls. Long time no talk, she says.
The meeting starts. At the break, I raise my hand and announce that I have one day and Pam gasps above the clapping, Oh, honey. In between the 12:30 and the two o’clock, I finally listen to my messages. It’s a familiar series of regular check-in messages that, one by one, lose their carefree tone and crumble from concern to anger. My mother leaves three or four and the last one is a doozy. She is crying and she is angry and she shouts more than says, You have stolen from me and you need to call me right away. I haven’t seen my mother since an afternoon last year when she left me in a restaurant after I brought up some difficult and never before spoken-about memories from my childhood. Since then we’ve barely talked and I have not seen her. I ask her, through my sister Kim, not to come to Lenox Hill while I am there, and when she offers to visit me in rehab and in the city after I return, again I tell her, through Kim, that I’d rather she did not.
Before the day in the restaurant I’d always been her faithful lieutenant in the ongoing war with my father. Never questioned her side of things, stood by her in the divorce, and generally agreed with her version of events, whatever they were. But with the marvels of therapy, a pushy counselor in rehab, and the miracle of suppressed memory, all that changed in the last year. Her tone with me—in voice mail messages, mostly—since that lunch has been conciliatory, careful, wounded. I cannot remember her ever being angry with me. We had always been on each other’s side. Me, Kim, and Mom against Dad. It was fun when he was away on a trip, tense when he returned. He was the dark one, she the light. When I was thrown out of college he was the one who delivered the harsh lecture and she the one who comforted me afterward. When I skipped school she rolled her eyes and wagged a finger, but she was never hard or harsh or punishing. So this message she leaves, short though it is, packs a hard, jarring punch.
I’m standing on the corner of 10th Street and University, not sure whether to return her call or go to the two o’clock meeting. How on earth does she know about the silver? I run through all the possibilities and come up with nothing. Are there serial numbers on silver ingots and coins? Did some precious metals office call her to confirm the sale? Thinking about government agencies triggers the paranoia from the night before, and in addition to feeling hungover, defeated, and ashamed, I start to feel that old nagging dread of being observed. I turn to walk home, and before I get more than a few steps down 10th, I hear Annie call my name. She stands on the corner looking like a pint-sized host of some public access kids’ TV show—red lipstick, goofy beret, lace-up Converse high-tops, jumbo overalls, megawatt smile. Get over here, lamb, you’re not going anywhere.
Annie and I go to Newsbar, a small coffee and Internet café just a few blocks up University from The Library. She asks me why I look so spooked, and as I start to tell her about my mother, the silver, the rug guy from 25th Street, and the six thousand dollars, I notice two middle-aged guys in windbreakers sitting three tables away, listening to what I’m saying. Just then a woman with what looks like an earpiece enters the place, and I grab Annie’s hand and tell her we have to go. Now. She doesn’t blink or react, just says, Gotcha, I’ll follow you. We rush to the street, and as we head toward Union Square, I notice Annie is still holding my hand. I’m not crazy, I tell her and she pats my arm. Of course you’re not, lamby, she whispers, as if letting me in on a secret. You’re insane.
When we get to Union Square I stop us in the middle of the steps on the south side and check and recheck to make sure there is no one within earshot. Still holding my hand Annie says, OK, we’re safe, now tell me what’s going on. So I tell her. Everything. My parents’ difficult marriage, the buried memories from childhood, my mother leaving me in a restaurant last year, the time at Newark airport and after when I believed I was being followed by DEA agents, trying to kill myself after two months in hotel rooms smoking crack, the silver, calling Happy, the terrace off my studio and the returning thoughts of suicide, the voices at Asa’s, and finally my mother’s phone message. Annie takes it all in and then says, laughing a little and still, and tightly now, holding my hand, That’s one mother of a mother lode. She pulls me down onto the steps to sit down. I’m not going to even pretend I understood half of what you just said, but what you need to do right now is call your mother and listen to whatever she’s got to say and then be honest and apologize. It’s no more complicated than that. So let’s go. Where’s your phone? If Annie said I needed to set my shoes on fire and sing Christmas carols I probably would. She has been sober only a little while longer than I have and has, from what I’ve heard of her share at The Library, seemed just as lost, but now, here, she seems like a Great Elder of sobriety.
I call my mother. She can barely talk she’s so upset. She tells me that Asa called my sister, whose number I gave him weeks ago in case of emergency. He called to tell her I had relapsed but that I was OK. When my sister asked where I got the money from, he said he knew I had recently sold some silver. When my sister, who didn’t know about the silver and assumed it was mine, tells my mother, she explodes. And now, she explodes all over again. How could you do it? she demands, sounding, within her rage,
genuinely bewildered. I don’t know, is all I have as a response, and I’m sorry.
As I’m getting off the call she says in the sternest voice I’ve ever heard her speak in, Enough is enough, you’ve got to stop this. Stop it right now. Do you hear me? Enough is enough. As much as I had dreaded the phone call, this last instruction, this line drawn, by my mother of all people—this girl-woman my sister and I took care of as kids, whom I’ve defended my whole life and avoided most of my adulthood—feels like something I’ve been missing for a long time but hadn’t realized until now. Like how you don’t know how hungry you’ve been until you see food, or how tired you are until your head hits a pillow.