American Junkie

by Tom Hansen

  The ride to Bailey-Boushay House took about a half hour. I rattled and bounced around in the back, strapped to the gurney. When we arrived, a nurse was outside to meet the medic and together they unloaded me from the aid car and wheeled me inside the building. We got into an elevator and I saw the nurse push the button for the third floor. The doors opened and they steered me down the corridor. I caught a glimpse of an aquarium. In the room they transferred me from the gurney to a new bed, similar to the last one, the mattress filled with air and a machine pump underneath. The nurse hung my feedbag and the saline on new stands and then left. With some difficulty I lifted my head to look around. My eyes moved slowly, checking out every little thing.

  I was a little confused. It looked like a nice hotel room, big, spacious. To the right were two windows covered with half-closed Venetian blinds, a couch below. Before me was a wardrobe sort of thing with drawers and a closet and a big TV in the center. A TV tray on wheels sat next to my bed with a remote control on it. To my left were more closets and a big bathroom. The door was slightly open. It was glowing white, the biggest bathroom I’d ever seen. Stainless steel handles lined the walls. Clearly, the room was only designed for one patient.

  What the hell was going on? I had expected to end up in some shitty old folks home that smelled of piss, or some nuthouse full of babbling psychos. Drooling maniacs, gakked out on brain pills, twitching. I was fairly sure that my survival so far had just been a fluke, a strange twist of fate, and that eventually I would have to suffer the punishment for the ultimate sin of destroying my body. I closed my eyes, waited, and then opened them. I was still there. I looked up at the perforated white ceiling tiles. I closed my eyes again.

  [LATE 1978]

  I paced back and forth outside the restaurant, running my hand along the wall. There was a bright pink neon sign next to the door, spelling out the name of the restaurant. Chopstick’s. An electrical buzzing sound was coming off it. I reached my hand toward the glowing tubes, but stopped short. Finally, I took a deep breath and pushed through the red doors. Inside it was dark. I stood there for a minute while my eyes adjusted. I passed the entrance to the lounge and heard voices from inside, but I couldn’t see anything.

  On the counter sat a cash register and a bowl filled with Andes crème de menthe chocolate mints wrapped in green metallic paper. Guarding the entrance to the dining area was a large wooden Buddha about four feet tall, its round fat belly smooth and shiny from the hands of people who had rubbed it searching for luck. Colorful posters of the Chinese zodiac adorned the walls. I’d been in here before. Dad would give me the olives out of his martinis. Sometimes, when we were here for dinner, he would vanish into the lounge and leave mom and I sitting there. Sometimes he would be gone quite a while.

  Louie, the owner, came striding out of the kitchen. Smiling, he reached up and shook my hand. He asked how my mom was doing and we chatted for a minute. When there was nothing more to say, he pointed me to the kitchen and told me that the dishwasher would show me the ropes. I had no illusions about this job. I knew it was just a sympathy job, because my dad was dead and he had spent more time and probably money in the lounge here than he had at home. While he’d been here, doing whatever it was he did, mom had been at home fighting off creditors. Begging the neighbors for food. Cleaning houses. Praying. While he’d been here, we’d been at home waiting. I didn’t really want the job. I just didn’t know what else to do. School was almost over and this was the next step. Right? I hoped it would lead to something, at least give me the sense of belonging and purpose I had felt working on my uncle’s farm, and so with blind faith I went ahead, hoping that some magical thing would happen and I would suddenly know where my life was going, a path out of the emptiness.

  A few nights later I came in to work early. The cooks were in the kitchen, chopping vegetables, playing cards, talking in Chinese. I wandered out into the restaurant. The place was empty. Suddenly I felt drawn to the lounge. I wandered in through the passageway, thinking I would find some answers to why my dad spent so much time there. A few men sat hunched on stools at the bar, nursing their drinks. There was a large round table with leatherette borders in the middle of the room, surrounded by chairs. In the center of the table was a small pit where an artificial fire burned endlessly. The yellow and blue flames looked real, but they had no effect on the fake logs. Candles in round dimpled red glasses sat on the tables that lined the walls, points of light in a permanent night. They flickered and splashed light onto the walls. I pictured my dad, sitting on a stool alone at the bar, and glittering before him a vodka martini, with a green olive, stuffed with a red pimento, stuck on a tiny yellow plastic swashbuckler’s sword. He’d remove it and place it on a cocktail napkin. I wondered if he’d been happy here, buying drinks like he did for his so-called friends who weren’t really friends, for strangers, even for the bimbo barmaid with the orange Corvette.

  The restaurant was getting ready to close and I went out back to be alone and have a smoke. The parking lot was empty, lit up by a single floodlight. Across the lot the restaurant’s dumpster sat at the edge of a hillside. Hordes of rats moved in the darkness. I liked to stand back there and watch them, swarming around the dumpster. I finished my cigarette and walked back inside. A table of loudmouthed drunks were still there, boozing it up. At least my dad had been a quiet drunk, not shooting his mouth off like a damned idiot.

  One of the men at the table had stood up and was bellowing and waving his arms. I wished they would hurry the fuck up and get out, I thought. So I could get out. But they showed no signs of slowing down. They were making me sick. I had to kill some time until they got tired, went out to their cars and drove home drunk. I wandered into the kitchen. A few of the cooks were playing cards, as usual. I made my way to the back room where the supplies were kept. It was a narrow room. A cardboard box full of fortune cookies sat on a shelf. Using a safety pin, like a surgeon I carefully extracted the fortunes from the cookies without breaking them until I had a pile of different colored little paper slips. I placed the empty cookies back in the box. I threw the fortunes away.

  [JUNE 7, 1999]

  My eyes were glued to the doorway. Had it been five minutes, or fifteen? I wasn’t sure. It might have been even more, one hour, two. I might have dozed off. It might even have been the next day. I could find out, I suppose, what day or time it was, but did it matter? It wasn’t like I had somewhere to go. A shadow moved out in the hall, and then it was gone.

  “Tom?”

  I woke. A man was standing next to the bed. He was smiling down at me, a toothy grin. Immediately I got a good vibe from him.

  “Hi,” he said. “My name’s Greg.” He had a bit of an overbite.

  His hand reached out and he set a little white paper cup on the TV table.

  “I’ll be your nurse. One of them, anyway. Here’s your methadone.”

  I was a bit confused, not seeing the Pain Cocktail. I emptied the cup out onto the table. Nine round white tablets spilled out.

  “At Harborview they gave me Pain Cocktail,” I said, chagrined.

  “I know, but we don’t have that here. We only have these, ten milligram tabs,” he said.

  “It’s a lot of pills,” I remarked.

  “Yes, I know,” Greg said, “but I’ve brought you this Ensure to drink them down with,” he said, setting the can down on the table and popping the top. He was obviously gay, the feminine mannerisms, the way he spoke, with a slight lisp, the way he moved. I took three of the pills and washed them down with a sip of the Ensure. It was sweet, thick and syrupy.

  “What is this place?” I asked.

  “Bailey-Boushay House.”

  “I know that, but what is it?”

  He laughed and said, “It was originally an AIDS hospice.”

  He saw that I was confused, and continued, “Well, it still is, but we’ve had a lot of empty beds since AIDS medications got better. We’ve had to take on some patients with other problems.
The man in the next room has had a stroke, and there’s another with a brain tumor.”

  “Hmm,” I said, “I’d kind of expected to end up in some shithole.”

  He giggled and said, “Well, you didn’t.”

  “Yeah. I guess not,” I said, “this room is pretty nice.”

  Greg smiled. I took three more pills, then another three. A short woman entered the room.

  “Hi CJ,” Greg said to her, “this is Tom.”

  “Hi Tom,” she said, standing close so I could get a good look at her. “I’m here to take a look at your wounds. See if we can get you better.”

  “Are you a doctor?” I asked.

  “No, I’m a nurse practitioner. But I’m a wound care specialist,” she said.

  “Well, you’ve got your work cut out for you,” I said.

  Greg said goodbye and left the room, saying he’d come back later. CJ indicated I show her the damage so I threw off the blanket, loosened the rope around my scrub pants and pulled myself over onto my side. It hurt. She noticed that moving around caused me pain and was careful, removing the bandages. Surprisingly there was very little pain pulling off the dressings.

  “Can you fix it?” I asked.

  She didn’t say anything, so I craned my head back to look at her.

  “Well, we’ll see. It looks like it’s starting. There’s some pink granulation, some new tissue.”

  Her hands were covered with latex gloves and she was holding folded up gauze pads stained with blood. She’d spread out some tools and dressings on the TV table.

  “It’s going to take some time. I’m going to need your help.”

  “My help?”

  “Your cooperation.”

  “Hmm. Okay.”

  She was finishing up, placing some kind of dressing on the wound, taping it down.

  “Okay, roll onto your other side and let’s see the other one.”

  I obliged.

  “The more you eat, the faster these will heal. You need to get some protein in you.”

  “I like the Ensure,” I said.

  “Well, that’s good, but you need solid food too.”

  “It’s a little hard to eat. I can’t chew because of my teeth, and this tube is giving me a sore throat.”

  The Nasal Gastric tube, it had suddenly become very uncomfortable, like being chained to the bed by my nose.

  “There are soft foods on the menu,” she said.

  “Okay. I’ll try.”

  She did something that hurt, and I jerked.

  “Did that hurt?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How is your pain?”

  “My leg. It’s all bent,” I said.

  “Bent??”

  “Yeah, I can’t straighten it out. The only time it feels okay is when I have it propped up on a pillow.”

  “Okay,” she said, “I’ll start giving you some morphine before we change the dressings. Okay?”

  “All right,” I agreed, even though from previous experience I knew morphine was pretty useless.

  “If you help me, I’ll help you. Okay?” she said.

  “All right,” I said. I wasn’t sure what I could do to help, but I agreed anyway. What else could I do, or say? No? That would have been rude. She finished up and was getting ready to leave.

  “What are your goals?” she asked.

  “Goals?”

  “Yes. What are your immediate goals?”

  “I want to go outside and have a cigarette,” I said seriously. It was as far ahead as I could think.

  She didn’t say anything, and I craned my head back to look at her. She was frowning slightly, but eventually she answered.

  “We can work together and try to make that happen. Okay?”

  That surprised me, I’d kind of expected the ‘don’t you know smoking is bad for you’ talk, the one about how it turns your lungs black, how it gives you cancer, kills you. If only.

  I fell asleep. When I woke up it was evening. The room was lit up by the glow of the television. The lights out in the hall had been dimmed. I held my hands up in front of my face. They used to be so beautiful, strong, graceful, long lithe fingers. That’s what girls used to say. Now they were misshapen, curled in on themselves, only the thumbs and forefingers worked. The backs were like a lunar landscape, pitted with scars and cigarette burns. I took the forefinger of my left hand and traced it over the damage to my right arm, the deep gouge halfway through the forearm, the place above the elbow where my tricep used to be. The bone was covered with scar tissue, smooth and shiny. I dug my fingernail into it, saw it cutting into me, but there was no blood, and I felt nothing. What’s that saying? ‘If you cut me, do I not bleed?’

  There was no way I could reach down and feel my left leg. That hip was where I’d done the most damage and the joint was frozen, stuck, it wouldn’t bend. My right hip seemed to be slightly better off. I lifted my right knee, reached down and traced the finger of my right hand over my calf, the big dent in the side, the scar tissue, smooth and hairless, like plastic, just a thin layer covering the bone. My skin. The thing I lived in. A barren, bombed out space between two opposing forces. My no-man’s land.

  [JUNE 1979]

  Shoppers came out of the Safeway, pushing carts full of groceries. I shifted on the bench seat of the car, trying to calm down. It was my turn to go in but I wanted to wait until some of the shoppers cleared out. I turned off the Buick, got out, walked around to the passenger side and got in. Adam slid across behind the wheel. He was getting impatient, and looked at me with that crazed look, the one he’d had ever since he’d crashed his VW Bug into a phone pole the year before when he was drunk. He’d shattered his leg, spent months in the hospital, doped out on morphine. Since then he just hadn’t been the same mellow guy I’d met a few years before, the guy I’d gone mountaineering and played soccer with.

  I’d just graduated high school. Going to the ceremony seemed rather pointless, no one at school knew me and I didn’t know them. My photo wasn’t even in the yearbook, I had ditched that day. However, my mom wanted the diploma, so I went to the office where I told them I was leaving the country. The woman I spoke with expressed extreme sadness that I would be missing this great event of my life. I went along, and pretended that it was some great tragedy.

  The shoppers had gotten into their cars and driven away. I got out and walked across the parking lot, imagining that time had slowed down and I was in a Sam Peckinpah movie. To the left was the fence at the edge of the parking lot and behind that the woods of Scriber Lake Park. I knew it like the back of my hand, from when I was six and we lived on the other side. Back then my mom had busted me for stealing a pack of gum from this store. She’d dragged me back and made me confess to the manager. Another time I had found four dollars in change in the coin return of the pay phone outside. She found that too, and called the phone company to see if they wanted it back.

  I had reached a crossroads. Or a dead end, I wasn’t sure which. After working at Chopsticks for a year and a half I had quit. I’d gotten promoted to busboy after six months, but that was the end of the line, there was no chance for advancement beyond that. The waiters were all Chinese, that job was reserved for them. Because of my dad’s death I was eligible for some help from the government if I went to school, so I signed up for some art classes at Edmonds Community College. I’d always been drawn to art, had picked up guitar quickly and had always been good at drawing and painting. It was a bit strange as my parents weren’t that way at all. However, the classes quickly bored me and I set about creating my own extracurricular art projects, packing the campus elevators to the brim with furniture and garbage. Then I would stand on the second floor balcony and watch as the elevators arrived on the first floor and watch the reactions of the people as they realized that there just wasn’t room for them anymore. I thought it was a poignant commentary on overpopulation but the authorities didn’t get it and kicked me out.

  I was
left with two options. Stay here in Edmonds, or go somewhere else. If I stayed, I would have to find some crummy job. If I kissed enough ass I could probably climb a few rungs on the ladder to somewhere and eventually be like everyone else in Edmonds, or at least look like them, pretend to be like them, but just the idea of that was repugnant. There had to be something more than this, a place where people weren’t so obsessed with how everything looked, where they were more concerned with how things really were.

  Even if I could stay here and work, there was something else I had noticed that I didn’t understand. When I’d been five, my dad sold the house I’d grown up in for twenty thousand dollars. It was only a little over ten years later and houses like that were two hundred thousand dollars now, while wages hadn’t gone up for shit. That might have been good for investors, for people who wanted to buy and sell, wheel and deal, but it wasn’t very good for the regular guy who wanted to buy a house and keep it, maybe give it to his kids. That was the goal, right? Buy a house, make it your castle, start a family? That was the American Dream, right? The Holy Grail I’d heard about my entire life. Even if I did find a job, it would be years before I could make a down payment. What would the price be then? Four hundred thousand? Five? A million?

  I walked up and stepped on the rubber mat. The automatic door swung open. I looked at my feet, concentrating on making myself invisible. I was never sure, though, if my invisibility was something I could conjure up at will, or just a naturally occurring phenomenon and that if I tried too hard it wouldn’t happen. I walked in nonchalant, as quietly as I could, holding my breath. The girls at the checkout counters to the right were chattering away and didn’t even notice me. Just inside the door I turned left into a little alcove, the wine section. I pulled the paper bag out of my pants, unfolded it and placed it on the dirty white linoleum floor. I reached for a bottle of Black Tower, ‘The white wine in the black bottle,’ they called it on TV. It had a cool looking bottle, cylindrical and black and painted to look like a castle turret. I grasped the bottle and put it in the bag. I was stealing. I was breaking the rules, and I knew that. But what was the point of following the rules if the people who ran things were always changing them? So I could survive? So I could slave away saving for a house while prices spun out of control? So I could chase The American Dream while it moved farther away faster than I could pursue it, disappearing over the horizon? That sounded a little like slavery to me.