American Junkie

by Tom Hansen

  Hoisting the bag under my arm, I started toward the door. If they saw me, all I had to do was drop the bag, run out, turn left and hop the fence into the woods and the marsh. I knew it like the back of my hand, from when we lived on the other side, all the trails, the shortcuts. They’d never catch me. Adam would take the car and pick me up on the other side. But no one gave chase. No one ever gave chase. It was like I wasn’t even there. I walked out to the Buick, the bag heavy in my arms, listening for the sound of footsteps.

  PART TWO

  WASTELAND

  [JUNE 17, 1999]

  “I’m seeing some improvement here,” CJ said, looking at my ass.

  “Really?” I replied.

  “Umm hmm. It’s very pink. There’s new tissue. It’s starting to fill in a little bit.”

  She had her things all spread out on the TV table.

  “The Comfeel seems to be helping,” she said. It was one of the new high tech dressings she’d been experimenting with the last two weeks, seeing what worked best.

  I was getting used to being in this place. Wake up at 6AM for pills. Turn on the TV. Fill out the meal slip, usually Frosted Flakes for breakfast, nothing for lunch, lasagna or something soft for dinner. A plastic bottle hung on the rail of the bed for me to pee in. If I had to take a dump one of the nurses came and helped me with a steel bedpan. There was nothing else to do but watch people walk past my room out in the hall. More pills at noon, 6PM, and Midnight. Every few days one of the nurses gave me a sponge bath. The only interesting thing that had happened was that my feeding tube had become blocked up one morning. CJ had disconnected it, and using a big plastic syringe without a needle, she’d injected Coca-Cola down it into my stomach over and over until it was unclogged. It made my nose cold.

  A man walked into the room.

  “Tom, this is Nick, the physical therapist,” CJ said.

  He was carrying something, some kind of steel triangle.

  CJ finished and Nick approached the bed.

  “I’ve brought you something,” he said, handling the triangle. “It’s called a trapeze.”

  From above my head he swung a steel bar out from the wall, and attached the trapeze to it.

  “This is for you to do pull-ups.”

  He stood back and folded his arms. I looked at him, incredulous.

  “Can you do it? Can you reach it?”

  The trapeze was about two feet away. My left arm reached the trapeze fairly easily and I grasped it with my forefinger, but my right arm couldn’t make it, the missing tricep made so I could barely hold it up in the air. I pulled up a bit with my left arm, flung my right arm up and finally was able to reach it, get my forefinger around it.

  “Okay, good. Can you do a pull-up? Let’s see. Give it a try.”

  I tried, but only made it halfway and my arms started to tremble and shake.

  “That was good,” he said, “Keep doing that. As much as you can. I’ll be back in to see you in a couple of days.”

  The parade had begun. The people. The talking. The ‘help.’ I hadn’t spoken to so many people in years. The physical therapist, the social worker, the nurses, my mom, the chemical dependency counselor. She asked me if I wanted to go into methadone maintenance treatment when I got out. She must have spoken to the people at Harborview, found out about my unwillingness to do drug treatment, because she hadn’t asked about that. Maybe the shrink had told them that I was a hopeless case.

  That might be true. But since I’d survived this thing, eventually I was going to have to leave, go out into the general fiasco that is the world and if I was really going to stop shooting heroin I would need a supply of methadone. I was hooked on it now instead and it was damned near impossible to kick that stuff and even if I could get off it, it usually took years, and I just wasn’t going to depend on other people for my drug supply, I’d always taken care of that myself and I knew how those methadone clinics worked, they thought nothing of making someone wait a week to get their first dose with all their damned red tape. They thought nothing of cutting people off cold for the slightest mistake. I’d gone to one briefly, over ten years ago, and there were so many rules and regulations, so many hoops to jump through, it was a big drag. I’d been kicked out in short order for not attending the group sessions. I’d gone to a couple but they’d been unbearable, just a bunch of idiots whining about their kids, their boyfriends, girlfriends, their jobs. I felt like saying “If you didn’t have those things, you wouldn’t have those problems” but I knew they would never understand, they were looking for things to whine about.

  Moderator: Well, Missy, how was your week?

  Missy: Awww, shit man. My old man got locked up on an old warrant, and the state took my kids away because.....

  It would go on for twenty minutes, the blame thing.

  Moderator: Well, Jim, how was your week?

  Jim: Fuck dude, my old lady fucked my brother and ...

  It would go on for twenty minutes.

  Moderator: So, Kelly, how was your week?

  Kelly: Sheee-it, that motherfuckin bitch up at the front desk lost my paperwork and...

  It would go on and on, in some sort of semi-intelligible jargon.

  I had everything in common with those people, and yet, I had nothing in common with them. I was just like them except I’d known that trying to live a normal life while being a junkie was impossible, a sure fire recipe for a train wreck. I had tried to contain the damage.

  But now I would have to go back there and deal with it. The showing up at the clinic every morning, the standing in line, the waiting. The prospect was depressing. There was always the chance that I would get kicked out again so right after I’d seen the counselor I started taking three 10mg methadone pills out of every nine and stashing them in a big tin Altoids box. Old habits die hard, I guess. I still had my toolbox as well, if I could figure out what all the drugs were. It would take some time, some research, but I could look them up in a Physicians Desk Reference. I was good at saving, always had been. My parents had taught me that.

  [1980]

  There was something intensely real about this, standing on this stage, under the hot lights in front of hundreds of people. I had been terrified of people in high school, but now, for some reason, I was not. I strapped on my guitar, an old sunburst ’57 Les Paul Jr. When I plugged in, I felt a familiar feeling of power. My fingers could dance over these tinny little strings, and the vibrations would go out through the cord to my amp, then out through the PA, amplified more and more every step of the way.

  Through the glare I could see that the place was packed, probably a thousand people. I turned the volume knob up all the way. My band mates were ready. Hunched next to my amp, I started playing Taps, slowly, the intro to our new song. I paused to let my guitar feed back when I held a note. Our drummer played a quiet military drum roll on the snare. These were the parts of the songs that I liked, the slower parts, the bits with tension, drama, dynamics and subtlety. I dragged out the intro for as long as I could, and let the final note ring out and feed back for an extra long time.

  Sweaty bodies were pressed up to the front of the stage and beer bottles were flying around the room and up onstage. In between songs I drank as much of a can of beer as I could, and threw the rest out into the crowd. It wasn’t just the few people in front that had gone crazy, it was all nine hundred or a thousand of them, as far back as I could see. Stage workers were busy throwing people back into the fray. I got into a zone and refocused on my guitar, sawing my pick hand across the strings like I was trying to cut it in half. I was in a trance, lost in the chaos, the noise, the heat.

  Suddenly it was over, and I was drenched in sweat. Smoke had pooled under the low ceiling and beer bottles were still flying around the room and up onto the stage. My ears didn’t seem to be working right. The crowd was in a frenzy but I could barely hear them. The Dead Kennedy’s, that night’s headliners, were down in front, pounding on the stage and s
creaming for more. I turned the volume knob of my guitar back up and walked in front of my amp, got down on one knee and put my ear to the speaker. It started to drone and feed back. I wasn’t trying to do anything in particular with the feedback like I sometimes did, I just needed to force the noise into my head, like there was something else I was trying to drown out. Eventually I stood up, threw my guitar to the floor and followed the others offstage.

  I had finally left Edmonds, a couple of years before. It had begun simply enough, driving into Seattle and hanging out in bars, usually Il Bistro in The Pike Place Market. One night, I’d wandered across the street to The Showbox, some kind of club. After, I’d run into some people outside, been invited to a party, and from there I was swept up in a whirlwind of shows, parties, hanging out. Drinking a lot. I’d finally found something to be a part of, something to belong to. I’d even lost my virginity, something I’d begun to think would never happen. It was the beginnings of the punk rock thing in Seattle and I got together with some guys, started a band. We called ourselves The Fartz and wrote one-minute songs that railed about the government, religion, war, the pretentiousness of art and stupidity in general. We’d been playing shows for about a year, had recorded a single and were even becoming somewhat popular in the Seattle scene and Alternative Tentacles was set to distribute our single nationally.

  But something was wrong. I was quite happy about many things, but not really with the music I was creating. I was a competent guitar player, and I could play what I wanted to play, make my fingers do what I wanted them to, make the guitar express what I was feeling, but I couldn’t write the songs I wanted to write. I knew that everyone had certain limitations, that not everyone could write songs like Jimmy Page and that all in all I should have been happy. What was happening? I’d finally gotten my life to move somewhere, and being in a band was the coolest thing a person could do. Wasn’t it? I couldn’t put my finger on what was wrong exactly, a hint that even this, being seen, making a name for myself, girls, parties, fun, excitement, being cool, all the things I’d dreamt about, all the things that I’d thought meant so much, all the things that I’d thought would make my life better, actually meant nothing. It seemed very odd to me at the time, and I tried to ignore it, but it was always lurking in the background, following me around like a shadow.

  The party was going full steam in the green room. The next band was getting ready to go onstage. I was starting to get drunk. I slammed the rest of a beer and threw the bottle aside, staggered out of the room, down the stairs and into the backstage bathroom. It was empty. The cracked floor was wet and beer bottles were strewn around, some of them broken. On one wall was a urinal, cigarette butts clogging the drain. Above that, nailed to the wall was a chalkboard, a couple beer bottles on the aluminium tray. I grabbed an empty Heineken bottle, took a piss in it, and replaced it on the tray. I looked over at the toilet. One of the hinges of the plywood door had come loose and it was hanging open crookedly. I walked over to the toilet and stood there for a second. I picked up the heavy cover of the tank, lifted it high over my head, and drove it as hard as I could down into the bowl. The toilet exploded. Water bubbled up from the floor. I stood there, staring. There was something beautiful, something perfect and pure in the shattered pieces of porcelain, as if the bathroom was a teacup, the pieces of porcelain tealeaves, and this scene a vision of my future.

  [JUNE 22, 1999]

  It’s starting again. Creeping up on me, almost like a dope-sickness, a really bad feeling you know is coming because you’ve run out of something, because something has come to its end. It’d been growing for over a month now, ever since I woke up, looking for a crack in my armor, probing here and there, searching for a way in. I’d tried to keep it at bay but the last couple of days it had overwhelmed me. Even if I didn’t want it, even if I’d made no attempt, I had started to feel. Pain. Not physical pain, the drugs were taking care of that, but the other kind, in my heart, my soul. It was forcing its way back in, like a burglar, breaking into me.

  I felt a hand on my shoulder.

  “Tom? Are you okay?”

  It was CJ. I covered my face with a pillow. Tears were streaming, my nose was running, my body gently convulsing.

  “Yeah, I’m okay.”

  “Are you sure? Is something wrong?”

  “I’m thinking... about.... things.”

  “What things?”

  “What I’ve done.... what I’ve done....”

  “Yes, well, you have a chance now to change that.”

  “I’ve been thinking ...”

  “About what?”

  “My dad.”

  “Your dad?”

  “He died when I was sixteen.”

  “Oh. Do you want me to get you something? Do you want to talk to someone?”

  “No, I just want to be left alone for a while.”

  “Okay. Just use the call button if you need anything. I’ll come back a little later to do your dressings.”

  “Okay.”

  My dad. You’d think I would have learned how to deal with it by now. People’s loved ones died all the time and it was tragic, sure, but then they went through the so-called stages of grief and just got over it, they carried on. I had some kind of disconnect there, somehow. It pained me as much as ever now. I’d been able to turn it off when I was out there, using and selling. I wiped my face with the pillow. The room faced west and the setting sun was squeezing in through the blinds. Luckily, it only lasted about a half-hour and then I was drained, tired, exhausted, done, finished for the moment. But somehow I knew it wasn’t over, that it was just the tip of the iceberg, there was going to be more of this, or something like it.

  [JUNE 25, 1999]

  “Tom, you have to roll onto your side for a little while each day or your wounds will ‘cook,’ they’ll get too hot and moist and it will slow things down,” CJ said, “It could cause the new skin to disintegrate.”

  I barely heard her. The feelings from the other day had been swamping me, it seemed like I’d been crying all week. I hadn’t been able to shut them out and it was pissing me off. I wasn’t crying at the moment but I was numb, in a trance, almost catatonic.

  “Do you want me to get Nick in here to help you?”

  I managed to pull myself out of it and into the present.

  “No. I can do it.”

  I wasn’t sure that I could, but I agreed so she would leave me alone.

  CJ finished patching me up, but she wouldn’t leave.

  “Let me see you do it,” she said, not trusting me to do it on my own. She was a sharp cookie.

  Irritated, I grabbed the rail of the bed and pulled myself over onto my side.

  “Like that?” I snapped.

  “Yes. Just do that a few times a day, for each side, for as long as you can. The wounds will get a little air. It’ll make them heal faster. We need to get you into the shower too. You can’t have sponge baths forever.”

  They’d been on me about that for a couple of weeks now, every time they brought pills or food or changed my nicotine patch.

  “We’ll lift you out of bed, put you in the geri-chair and wheel you in there. It won’t take long,” she said, trying to make it sound like no big deal. She had no idea. Four years ago, at Harborview, when I was there for the skin graft, I’d had a shower. I would never forget it.

  “I’ll tell you what. I’ll make you a deal,” she said. “If you take a shower we can start wheeling you out to the deck to smoke.”

  I really wanted a cigarette, so I agreed to the blackmail.

  “Okay, but not now. Not tonight.”

  [1981]

  In the mirror behind the bar my face stared back at me. It looked strange, I thought, hovering there, above the colorful bottles of booze. Whenever I saw my reflection it always stared straight back at me, and somehow I had the feeling that it shouldn’t. The bartender walked in front of me, I snapped out of it and looked away, towards the door. It was We
dnesday at Tugs, a gay bar, but they had set aside Wednesday as New Wave Night.

  Some people I knew were filing in. I nodded at them but out of the corner of my eye I could have sworn I saw my face in the mirror, still staring at me. I suddenly noticed the music, droning from the speakers suspended from the ceiling. Joy Division, Love Will Tear Us Apart. I spun around on my barstool to face the dance floor. Smoke floated around the room in layers, occasionally catching the light like waves in slow motion.

  I finished my beer, slid off the barstool and started for the back where the bathrooms and pinball machines were. Walking through the crowd on the dance floor, I felt a hand grab my ass and squeeze. I arrived at the pinball machine and lit a cigarette. I set the smoke on the glass, the cherry hanging over the side. It was a Centaur machine, a type I’d played before. I put a quarter in, pulled back the plunger and let it go. The shiny steel ball bounced around up at the top, then rolled down toward the drain. I pushed the buttons on the side of the machine and thrust my hips against the back of it, knocking the ball back up to the top. The pounding music from the dance floor almost drowned out the sounds of the machine.

  A young man came out of the bathroom and stood a few feet away, looking at me. He was well built, had on tight jeans and a sweaty t-shirt. He manoeuvred through some people and got behind me. I could sense him back there, but thought he was just watching. I picked up my smoke and took a drag. Then I felt his hands on my hips lightly. I stayed focussed on the pinball machine. He slid his hands up and down my sides. When I didn’t react, he pressed himself against my butt and pushed me slowly and gently forward until I was pinned between him and the machine. The silver ball rolled down the drain. His hands began to reach around to embrace me and I squirmed out from his grasp, faced him, smiled, shrugged and said “No thanks. I’m straight.” He made an exaggerated show of acting disappointed, then smiled again, turned and walked away into the crowd. I dropped my cigarette onto the floor and stepped on it. I felt a little sad. It would be so easy, I thought...if only...if only I were someone else, not Tom Hansen. If only I liked boys and not girls. But that was something I had no choice in. Nature had made me the way I was. I lit up another cigarette, turned back to the pinball machine, and dropped in another quarter.