“What?”
There were ten seconds of silence. I couldn’t wait to hear what Funboy was going to say next. He took his time.
“They got twenty-fives down at Druid Hill,” he said finally.
My jaw dropped.
“Twenty-fives?”
“That’s right. Big quarter-gram vials for twenty-five dollars. Man, that’s all I been spending! Twenty-five dollars a day. Just one of them things. Per day. You know how I used to have a forty-dollar-a-day habit? Well, one of them shits does it. Man. Just one of them damn shits. I even wake up and I even got a little bit left.”
“Damn, they got twenty-fives?”
That changed everything. They usually sold dope in twenty- or forty-dollar vials. Ten-dollar scramble on the Eastside. But twenty-fives? What did that even look like?
“What do they even look like, Funboy?”
“Oh man. Fat white tops that big full to the top with little rocks of raw. Them rocks are packed in white powder. That powder has little brown streaks of pure raw in it,” he said dreamily.
“How big are the vials, Funboy?” I asked.
“That big,” Funboy said again into the phone.
I sighed. He was an idiot. I realized I would have to take a look at one for myself.
Looking in the phone book, I found another detox clinic, on the far north side of town. I took I-83 and got off at Northern Parkway. The clinic had a long driveway. And trees. They were serious.
“We offer buprenorphine detox only once in each patient’s lifetime,” the nurse said sternly. “You can only have this treatment once at this clinic, so it is necessary that you are completely committed to freeing yourself from your addiction.”
I gave her a check for $150. She gave it back to me. I gave her the cash, in tens and fives and singles. At this clinic, they injected the buprenorphine. I liked it better that way.
That night I tried to drive myself into sleep by telling myself stories about my bright dopeless future. But by 4:00 a.m. I was talking to Henry Abelove. The next morning I accidentally got on 83 going the wrong way. I got off and then remembered that I couldn’t get on 83 going north at this exit. So I had to drive five blocks up and one over to catch the next northbound ramp. Or was it six blocks up? Or three over? Then I unexpectedly ran into a charming little dope spot down in Patterson Park.
Convinced I couldn’t get clean in Baltimore, I headed across country to the Chicago suburbs and kicked in my father’s basement. I told everyone I had the flu. It worked. The key was that I didn’t know where to score in the suburbs and I didn’t try to. Plus I got arrested for driving with a suspended license and when they let me out of jail my car had been towed and I didn’t have any money to get it out. So I couldn’t even try to score.
Well, I did try to score. Lamely. Half-dead from kicking, I crept around Waukegan in my stepmother’s car, leaning out the window and asking people at bus stops where to cop. But all I ever got was crack. I wanted to believe it was dope really bad, but it was crack.
“Hey what you got, man?”
“Crack rock, tens and twenties.”
“How about some heroin?”
“We ain’t got it man.”
“Come on, I really need it.”
The dealer looked at me. He saw I wouldn’t take no for an answer.
“OK, here you go.”
I gratefully gave him the money and he gave me the crack. Smoking crack while kicking is a really terrible idea. But in the Chicago suburbs I was unable to score any heroin that wasn’t also crack. But, given that it was the North Shore of Chicago, I deserved some credit for even getting the crack. After about five days the withdrawals started to subside. My father gave me money to get my car back. My appetite came back. I started to smile again.
I spent the next six weeks in Chicago, recovering. My life, which had been so chaotic, settled into a comfortable pattern. At noon I would get out of bed. I would walk from the house to my car, which was parked on the side of the street. I would drink whiskey in my parked car and read Taco Bell wrappers while eating Taco Bell and drinking whiskey. A couple hours later, I’d drive the fifteen miles over to my friend Cash’s apartment to smoke pot, take ephedrine, and play a video game called Star Wars Racer. I’d spend about five hours there. Then I’d drive back, taking the long, slow roads because my vision would start cutting out by then.
But let me tell you a little bit about Star Wars Racer. In the game, you control a futuristic racing machine. It looks kind of like a car. It works exactly like a car. You race around a futuristic video-racing course. The goal of the game is to out-race your opponent. My opponent was Cash.
“There you go, Mike! There you go,” Cash said encouragingly. “Your hand-eye coordination is starting to come back. Your will to succeed is coming back. You’re hungry again. It’s the old Mike again!”
He beat me every single time. It was a kind of lesson. At the end of August I drove back to Baltimore. I got the sheaf of bills out of my mailbox in the lobby of my apartment building, and went up the elevator. It was early September and grad school was about to start back up. I was done with coursework, but would be teaching a composition class to earn the stipend that was supporting me while I was supposedly working on my dissertation.
“I’m going to really get going on my dissertation now,” I said. “I’ve conquered dope, I’m strong and healthy, my future is bright.”
I put the bills on my table and started responsibly to shuffle through them. Then I saw a little white powder out of the corner of my eye on the tabletop. In two seconds I’d rolled up a five-dollar bill and snorted it up. It tasted like dirt or dust. I sneezed. I had tears in my eyes. I ran out the door to cop some real dope.
A year later I was with Cat in Boston. We were visiting a friend of hers. I’d been off dope for two months. Cat didn’t even remember that I’d ever used hard drugs. Or at least she didn’t mention it.
I was tired after our long drive from Baltimore to Boston. I threw our bags on the bed of the guest room and went to the bathroom. I opened the medicine cabinet. Inside was a half-full bottle of Percocet. I took five instantly. I started to sweat with panic and desire.
“What’s wrong, honey?” Cat said.
Her lovely long blonde hair set off her perfect tan skirt and long tan legs and high tan leather heels. It made my nose itch. It made my arms horny for needles.
“Nothing. I’m just a little tired. You guys go on out without me.”
I took a cab to the local Greyhound station. I ended up copping from some skinheads.
Johns Hopkins at Bayview on the east side of town offered a detox program for heroin addicts. They shot me up with bup and gave me Tylenol in a baggie, just like the other places. But they had a more hands-on approach, a more psychological and scientific orientation.
“So what made you decide to get clean?” the nurse asked me. I was kind of surprised. This wasn’t in the script.
“I just realized that heroin addiction was interfering with my future plans,” I said cautiously. She nodded. I went on enthusiastically.
“You have to have something to believe in to quit,” I told her. “You can’t just quit for nothing.” She nodded encouragingly.
“And I believe I have a bright future. It’s like now my future will be my high.”
I had just recently come up with this, after failing at the Center for Addiction Medicine again. Now, hearing myself tell it to someone else, I began to feel confident.
“Has any recent event caused you to want to quit?”
“Event? No.” I paused. “I’m quitting because I’ve decided it is the rational thing to do.” I smiled.
“Well,” she said, “people often seek treatment due to some traumatic event. Did anything bad happen recently?”
“No,” I said. “I’m more concerned with what hasn’t happened recently. Being clean, for instance,” I joked.
“Think,” she pressed me. “Are you sure nothing bad has happened? Something that really might m
otivate you? Trouble with the law? Eviction? You discovered you have AIDS?”
What the hell was up with this lady?
“No, absolutely nothing bad has happened to me,” I said firmly. “I have decided to quit because of my future. My bright future motivates me.”
She smiled sadly and gave me my shot.
I lasted three days that time. It happened on the afternoon of the third day. I was going up the elevator to my apartment when I suddenly remembered what white tops look like. The doors opened at my floor. I quickly pressed the “close door” button with one finger and the button for the ground floor with the other. I tried not to think about what I was doing.
“Hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry,” I said.
The doors closed. The elevator started to descend. Between the third and second floors the elevator clanged to a stop. I was the only one on it. It was the middle of an October weekday. Most of the other residents would be at work, in the library, or in class. I was stuck.
This is a sign, I thought. This is obviously a sign. The world is telling me that I have a choice. That I can make it. I can make it without dope. Remember my future.
I banged on the elevator door. I pressed the emergency call button.
“Hello?” A heavily accented voice answered through the staticky elevator speaker.
“Ah, yes, I’m stuck up here in the elevator, between the third and second floors, I think. Could you come get me now?”
“You want to make order?”
“What? No. I’m…look, I’m stuck on this elevator!”
“Say more slowly please again,” the voice said.
I suddenly recognized the voice. I broke into a cold sweat. It was the proprietor of the shitty Chinese restaurant on the ground floor of my building. Somehow the call box line was connected to his restaurant.
“Um, look I think there may be a mis-”
The line went dead. I began to wonder if the world was telling me to get high. I pressed the call button again.
“Hello?”
“Um, look. I know this seems weird, but I really am stuck in the elevator in this building. 3400 North Charles. Two-and-a-half floors above you. If you could just call the management company right away and—”
“If you no want order Chinese food no call Chinese restaurant!”
The line went dead. I slumped against the elevator wall. I closed my eyes and imagined a white top’s cold head and beautiful glass throat. It was singing a little song. I jabbed the call button frantically.
“Do not hang up! This is not a joke. This is a serious emergency. There is a pregnant woman here in this elevator and—”
The line went dead. I remembered how fresh dope sometimes smells like new paint. My nose watered.
“What about my bright future?” I asked myself.
“The future lasts forever,” I answered.
I banged fast and slow on the metal elevator door.
Twenty minutes later someone heard me banging and called the apartment people. They let me out and I ran down to my car and sped off to Pulaski Street.
The next day I wrote a threatening letter to the management accusing them of “false imprisonment.” Plus I told them about how the elevator call box was connected to the Chinese restaurant. That was a serious conflict of interest.
In the letter they wrote back, they were careful not to admit any wrongdoing. The specter of their legal liability did not, however, entirely escape them. They offered me three months of free rent. That came in handy. Three months lasts a long time when you’re a junkie. But the future lasts forever.
CHAPTER 4
Hello, Stripe
Where did the white tops get in? There are white doors and windows all through my life, but I remember a couple early ones.
For a long time, I would go to bed early. In summer, my bedtime came when it was still light out. There was a tree outside my window. Once it had two main branches. But by the time my memory starts it was Henry-shaped; its missing branch, lost in a storm, anchored it in the ocean of time before memory.
“Time for bed, Michael; give your father a hug.”
“Yes, Dad.”
With the lights out it was still light in my room. Sometimes my parents would be sitting out in the yard and their laughter would come in through the half-open window. A fan would be on, slowly mixing sleep into the heavy light. I’d fall asleep with one sticky eye on the tree. All those summer evenings, and eventually the one-armed tree got caught in me. Twelve years later, I recognized Henry the first time I saw him. Memory is like that.
My first word was clock. It’s an unusual first word, spoken with unusual clarity, and my mother reports being startled, thinking someone else was in the room. My best friend was Dan Rest. I met him the week we arrived from Ireland. His last name is one of those deceptively simple German words, like thing, that obviously mean something else. Clock. Dan was completely American. I still had a strong Irish accent, and came equipped with all kinds of outlandish Irish things. Like a red leather satchel my mother gave me to take to first grade. Everyone else had backpacks made of some thin light material. I wanted a backpack like that. I quickly became an expert in these American things. I carefully studied backpacks, lunch boxes with cartoon characters on the outside, shiny Capri Sun juice pouches, Big Wheels, G.I. Joe action figures.
I knew the soft plastic hand strap of the lunch boxes better than the machine that made them, and could distinguish it from the slightly harder plastic of the cartoon thermos top, and the still harder plastic of the thermos body. I soon grew so proficient I could make these things out of my body. At night, lying in bed, my body was a factory for Big Wheels and blue nylon backpacks.
I had to make them, since my parents didn’t have very much money at this time, and my mother was determined to exhaust the stock of Irish things before buying anything new. Of course, most of the things I made were invisible and didn’t do me any good at school. But some did. My version of the movie Gremlins for example. Gremlins was the hottest movie at school, in the parks, on the block for a whole season. Some parents, including my own, wouldn’t let their children see it, so those who did had a certain special grandeur.
I soon realized I had to see Gremlins, but since I couldn’t see the one in the theater, I had to make it myself. I got a workable script from Dan, whose enlightened parents had taken him to it. It went like this: A father gets an unusual pet for his son, a Mogwai, a kind of small cute white furry animal. His delighted son names it “Gizmo.” The guy the father purchases it from tells him not to get it wet and not to feed it after midnight. When the kid gets it wet, Gizmo multiplies. When the new Mogwais get food after midnight, they turn into terrifying monsters: gremlins. The worst gremlin is Stripe. He attacks people with a chainsaw. He drives a car. He throws lots of Mogwais into a big swimming pool.
I made the film that night before I fell asleep, and I was ready during recess at school the next day. The way this worked is that the kids who had seen the new cool movie would stand in the center of a semicircle of other kids, and trade reminiscences about it.
“Do you remember when Stripe gets that chainsaw? That was awesome!”
“What about when that tractor crashes through the window in the living room? Awesome!”
I stepped into the circle, “How about the part where he spills that glass of water on Gizmo?”
They looked at me. “You saw Gremlins?” I replayed the scene in my mind. The water blots out Gizmo’s dog shape, leaving the thick body dough curling on the floor. Little stalks shoot up. Some thicken into dog shapes. Some turn into trees. One becomes a book. “Sure. He spills water on Gizmo and then there are all these other Mogwais. It’s awesome!”
My conviction and intensity were not faked, and they saw and believed. I’d lain awake all the last night playing the movie in my mind. Standing in that circle, I saw every scene in color. My movie had grown far beyond the bounds of Dan’s skimpy script, but I kept those rich scenes secret. The scene in my movie
showing how Stripe actually gets the chainsaw remained secret. Other things about Stripe remained secret. The special secret of Stripe’s birth remained secret.
You see, to me, this movie was more than just a way of increasing my status with my little friends. I really wanted to see Gremlins, but my parents wouldn’t let me see the one in the theaters, so I had to make my own. In order for my Gremlins to be real, I needed that circle of kids. I didn’t need the movie to be cool with them. I needed them in order to see the movie. That circle of kids was the projector that played the film I’d made. Focused by that semicircle, the watery images I’d made up in bed the previous night took on vivid colors, became real.
The others’ presence was what allowed me to see something I couldn’t see in any other way. Not just Stripe holding the chainsaw, but Stripe the master of water, Stripe born inside his enemies, born of his enemies. My Gremlins was real. In this movie made in my body and projected on that school recess semicircle, everyone and me dissolved. I didn’t do it just to make friends. No one just wants that. People want something real from people. We want some thing. Relations between people are a means to an end, like ladders and cranes and movie projectors. People get together to bring new things into the world.
Another incident illustrates this principle. (Or is it an illness?) This was even earlier, touching that region of deep memory where my way of walking, the way I tie my shoes originates. There was a children’s game called Candy Land and everyone had it, even me. Candy Land was beautiful. It was a board game, like Monopoly, and you moved your little piece around the board based on the cards you drew. I think it was one of those games without winners or losers, like life.
The board was a triumph of Art: It showed inherently beautiful things in a realistic way. Gumdrop mountains, a molasses swamp, candy canes a thousand feet tall. Like all great artworks, it was also a map, a map that showed new things in the little town we lived in. One afternoon on the swings I announced that Candy Land was a real place six blocks away from my house.
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