“Charlie, I—” He cut me off. His eyes were white all the way around the iris.
“No, why should I go to jail? Let them. I’m going to go to the police. I’ll show them where it is. The basement.” Half a foot from my face, his intense white eyes stared through me.
“Charlie—”
“Because I don’t know if I can take knowing they’re out there anymore, Mike.”
I had another bad thought. More than likely there was no other white house in Charlie’s childhood, no evil older couple anywhere. It would be insane to believe what Charlie was saying. It would be insane to believe what Charlie obviously believed.
This wasn’t the first time. Cash. Andy. Funboy. Dorsom. All my life I’ve been drawn to extrasensory people. People who see through things. Charlie’s too-white eyes kept staring through me. Sweat shone on his cheeks. I was drawn to people who wanted things. “I’ll kill them, Mike.” What did Charlie want? There was some red in his eyes now, and they were full of tears. Andy and Dorsom are dead. Cash is in an institution. I don’t know where Charlie is. There is no end to wanting. When you have senses that go through things like a chainsaw, one day you’ll look around and there will be nothing left.
To write is to study the self. “To study the self is to forget the self.” To forget the self is to be open to all things. As I’m writing this, I occasionally stop to look out the window and remember so I can write a little more. Sometimes, now for instance, the tree outside my window stops my look. Like a raised hand, palm outward.
I convinced Charlie not to go to the cops by telling him I’d help him get the Andersons. My attitude in those days was that if your friend started acting like Charlie was acting, it was your job to keep him out of the asylum. Besides, I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t just some kind of bad trip. It was impossible to tell with Charlie. He came to college declaring that acid no longer had any effect on him. On the way to the car, we ran into Chip and Eva, who looked like they’d been arguing. Eager for help, I asked if they wanted to go for a ride with us. They did.
Chip in the passenger seat, Charlie and Eva in the back, me driving. Charlie was caught and held in triangular space. Quieted. He stared out the window. We set off through the dusk. Eighty degrees, windows down, “God Only Knows” by the Beach Boys on the stereo.
Chip was smiling and tapping his feet. I looked through the rearview mirror. Eva had a soft smile on her lovely face and was swaying gently. Charlie was bone white and looked like he was about to throw up.
“Turn that fucking music off!” he snapped. “God only knows? God only goddamn knows?” I turned off the music.
“Are you carsick?” I asked gently.
It was too late to turn back. (“I don’t want to ruin our little trip,” Charlie said ominously.) I’d been planning to drive to a quiet bar a little way out of town where we could all just relax and talk Charlie down out of whatever he was going through. I now decided that would be inappropriate. There was a forest preserve on the way, and while it technically closed at sunset, no one ever got busted for being there. When I was feeling down, I often took walks by the lake. I had fond memories of the place.
“I absolutely agree that your feelings about this are very valid,” Charlie was telling Eva as we pulled in, “but I just have a tiny question about whether it’s healthy, not for us, but for you.” As the disastrous première of our play approached, Eva had been trying to drop out and get her understudy to take over her role.
“How is it not healthy for me?” she asked.
“Maybe it is, maybe it is,” Charlie smoothly answered. “Maybe it is healthy for you. I just wonder if you are really going to do it. There’s a big difference between wanting to do something and actually going ahead and doing it. I don’t know how you get past that difference. I really don’t. I want to work with you on it.” Charlie was a great director.
I nodded in the rearview mirror, wanting to encourage Charlie’s interest in healthy things.
“You know, what Charlie says makes a lot of sense, Eva,” I said. “And he’s not telling you to do one thing or another. He’s just talking generally about some potential problems with action in general.”
Charlie nodded vigorously. “That’s absolutely right, Mike. You have a clear sense of your options, Eva. Probably a clearer sense than anyone in this car. And you know which one you prefer, which is really very healthy. We’re just trying to clear away some of the things that can come between deciding to do something and doing it. Some of the garbage.”
I was very satisfied with this kind of talk. Confidence building. It built a healthy sense of camaraderie without raising any potentially thorny issues.
“I’m not saying there are going to be problems in this particular case,” Charlie continued. “I’m not saying there are any problems at all.” I nodded around at everyone. No problems.
“You’re not saying anything at all,” Chip said dryly. “Of course Eva can’t quit the play. It opens in two weeks. She’s the only one who knows the lines. Her ‘understudy’ Allie has never even been to a single rehearsal. I don’t know why you can’t just say what you mean for once, Charlie.” I was extremely disappointed by Chip’s attitude and tone. I parked the car.
“You’re a very superior person, Chip,” Charlie said. “You remind me of Mr. Anderson.”
“Who’s Mr. Anderson?”
“OK let’s get going,” I said loudly. “Chip, do me a favor and get the beer out of the trunk. Charlie, can I bum a cigarette?” As we walked to the picnic benches, Charlie was humming “God Only Knows.”
When we got there, opened the beer, and looked around, we were all suddenly overwhelmed by space. The vastness of space seemed literally to push the words back into our faces. It was a clear spring evening; you could see the stars, the distant hills over the lake, the acres of grass stretching toward the highway. There was even a house in the distance. One of those uncanny middle-Ohio houses. An ordinary suburban house missing a suburb. Sitting in a vast empty field. Folded in on itself like an ear. Focusing all that silence, all that emptiness. The horrible little kitchen windows looked out over acres of dead or living grass. It was easy to imagine Mr. and Mrs. Anderson living in such a house.
CHAPTER 6
White Out
Chip graduated that May. Eva and I would be back the next fall. We’d be living together too. But for the summer, Eva and Chip were living in his apartment in SoHo. I flew in from Chicago to spend a week with them in July. As soon as I walked through the door, Eva hugged me, her face shining. Chip gestured toward the dining room table, where there was a shaving mirror with several white lines on it.
“What’s this, coke? You know I don’t like coke,” I said, dropping my bag.
“No,” Chip said.
“What, the other thing?”
“Yes.” Eva stood in the corner, watching me. Chip was in the doorway, watching her watching me. I stood against the wall. The mirror with the white thing lay on a table in the center of the triangle.
The first time is magic. What does that really mean? Let’s start with another, more familiar kind of first-time magic. I love pop songs, and the first time you hear a really great pop song is magic. For instance, today is Saturday. On Tuesday, I bought a CD by a band called Gnarls Barkley, which several people had recommended to me. And Kellefa Sanneh, my favorite music critic, in his column for the New York Times called track two, “Crazy,” the best pop song of the year.
So I put it in my car’s CD player with a sense of anticipation. The first time you hear a song, it isn’t very clear. That is, you don’t recognize its shape. You can’t, because you’ve never heard it before. Listening to “Crazy” for the first time, I didn’t recognize the throb of the bass before the vocals start, because I didn’t know the vocals were about to start. On a more microscopic level, I didn’t recognize the bass as a throb because I didn’t know the bass would keep repeating the same note throughout the entire song. I loved it, absolutely and instantly, but
I didn’t love the tripping way Cee-Lo sang “live life” in the line, “My heroes had the heart to live life out on a limb.” When I heard “live,” I didn’t know “life” was coming. When I heard “limb,” I didn’t remember the line had begun with “My heroes.” I wasn’t sure the line was over. I didn’t know what exactly I was hearing. It was the first time I’d ever heard it.
I got an instant joy from the song. I was smiling after ten seconds. But what I listened to, what made me smile, wasn’t exactly the shape of the song. I wasn’t sure what its shape was. That shape would gradually come into focus as I heard the song again and again. Already by the second listen, I heard the throbbing bass before the vocals start. By the fourth, I loved the tripping way Cee-Lo sang “live life.” And now, after hearing it maybe thirty times, I know the song’s shape. And I really like it; it’s just an amazing, perfectly crafted pop song. I recommend it to everyone I know.
But the magic has vanished. The song’s shape is very clear to me now. If you played three seconds of it I’d be able to identify it. This clear, perfect song stands where the magic used to be. I no longer feel there is a new hole in the world, and that every future thing is streaming in from it. That hole has been plugged. It’s been plugged by the song. By the throbbing bass, by Cee-Lo’s tripping singing stutter. The shape of the song is the fossil of the magic. Good-bye “Crazy”! But what am I saying good-bye to? The CD is still in my player. I still listen to it sometimes. Then good-bye to the invisible, inaudible “Crazy,” the magic, first-time “Crazy,” the angel “Crazy.”
This is what “the first time is magic” means with most things. As you become more familiar with the shape of a song or a face, the magic sensation you had the first time slowly drifts away from it. The magic drifts away from the thing, as if it only ever had an accidental, lucky connection with it. The song is still there, but the magic is not.
This is not what happens with dope. This is not what junkies mean when they say “the first time is magic.” Just the opposite. The first time magic evaporates from “Crazy.” The first time magic burrows deeper and deeper into the white tops. It sinks into the molecules of the dope. The first time you do it, the magic isn’t so strong. But as time goes on, it gets stronger. With “Crazy,” I lost the magic as the song got clearer. With dope, the magic got so strong I couldn’t see the dope. Now, all I can see in dope is that first-time magic. Pick up a white top, it’s like picking up a white phone, and the angel of the first time is singing down the line.
So if you ever see a junkie gazing lovingly at a needle or a vial of dope, it’s not like a miser looking at his money or a voyeur staring at porn. The vial of dope you see isn’t there for the junkie. To him, it’s a little pane of clear glass, and he’s watching his first time through it. It’s the most personal thing in the world. It’s not like a voyeur staring at a picture of nameless naked bodies. It’s like a prisoner looking at a photo of his family.
It still doesn’t last, the first-time dope magic doesn’t last. But it doesn’t last in a different way than “Crazy” doesn’t last. The magic of “Crazy” grows old and dies and decomposes in me, pretty quickly too. I bought it Tuesday. Friday I was sitting in my car wondering if something was wrong with the volume or the treble. “My heroes had the heart to live life out on the limb.” I last longer than the magic of “Crazy.” I don’t last longer than the magic of the white tops. If you’re out there, and you’ve experienced the first-time magic of the white tops, then don’t worry: It’s not going anywhere. It’s not going anywhere you’re not going. You’re not going anywhere without it.
So I did it. Up the nose through a straw. Then we went up the stairs and out on the roof. This is kind of hard to write about. My legs felt funny as I went up the stairs. I wondered if I was dying. I emerged on the roof, late afternoon mid-July in New York, the city spread out across the ten directions, heavy gold clouds in the blue sky. I wondered if the funny feeling I had was good or bad and then it was doubtless.
A single cloud moved through the blue sky. I was on my back looking up. My eye was a glass box, and inside it there was no time. I kept the cloud inside it. I wish I could show it to you. I never imagined this could happen. A breath entering my nostrils coiled over the nerves, losing all dimension. This was the end of desire. The end of wanting. The end of fear. The end of desire. I had carefully preserved some precious memories from my childhood. Those memories seemed to promise a great happiness at the end of things. I had taken them as signs from the invisible world, and made a private religion of them. Lying on my back on Chip’s roof, all the memories of my childhood turned white one by one.
Until that afternoon, those memories had been my most valued possessions. They aren’t in this memoir because they don’t exist anymore. All that remains are different colored frames around the same white picture. The same picture of white. Like the Candy Land story. I release them like white balloons. Good-bye, childhood memories! I don’t need you anymore. While I was lying on the roof freed from time, from desire, from loneliness, from change, the white was freed from that afternoon and began traveling into the future and into the past. The white tops looked into the polished, carefully preserved surfaces of those early memories as if looking into a mirror. “You were waiting for me. When you were three, what did you see from the carseat? You saw me.”
Once you know that marvelous white immortality, there is no place, no image, and no face in your past or your future that doesn’t turn toward it. A beautiful girl or boy, a pleasant beach, a lovely building: A distant glory glows around those shapes. Their far side faces the white sun.
I should probably say that my experience with the drug, although rather common, is by no means shared by everyone. For many other people, the dust inside the white tops is strangely inert. It doesn’t do much to them. My friend Dave, for example. In Dave’s case, dope’s power seemed strangely confined to the time he did it. While it was in his system, he thought it was marvelous. But the next day he could only remember a kind of sleepy feeling, and had no wish to do it again.
I was completely baffled by this. As an experiment, I got him to do it one more time. He did it, and as soon as it started to take hold he started saying how wonderful it was. I gave him a pen and paper and forced him to write down what he felt. “The best…I love it…immense, spacious.” That evening, while the drug lasted, he also remembered the other time he’d done it, and how wonderful that was. The next day he awoke saying that it was just like taking sleeping pills. I showed him the page he’d written the previous night. He read it over. He remembered writing it, but he felt no connection to the words or the feelings they described.
“I must have been high,” he said, and threw it out. He also would have thrown out half a vial of dope if I hadn’t been there. A pervert.
How do you explain this? Addiction science is extremely primitive, and talks vaguely of “predispositions.” Granted, if you are foolish enough to even try the white tops you’ve got some kind of predisposition, to stupidity if nothing else. But what about people who try it, love it, and then just forget about it? The literary writers have done little better than the doctors. William Burroughs, the author of Junky and Naked Lunch and an addict himself, for example, claimed that anyone who used it would get addicted. His error flows from the common mistake of equating addiction to the drug with the physical dependence that is one of its less pleasant side effects. This is foolish. Any old lady who takes OxyContin for two weeks will develop a dependence and suffer some withdrawal symptoms. When the doctor takes her off it, she’ll feel like she has a mild flu for a couple days, then she’ll forget about it.
Unless it got into her memory. Then she’ll go to doctor after doctor after doctor getting scripts. Then one day the pharmacies will put it together and she’ll be cut off. Then she’ll make her way, through seven or eight different contacts, each one a little lower, to Dominic’s, where I’ll meet her. 2001. Her name was Betty, she was maybe sixty. She drove a Lincoln.
> What’s the difference between Dave and Betty? Some people, the Daves, must have a kind of memory immune system. When a Dave takes the drug, the memory immune cells sense the white moving into the memory system and go to work. They bind to the white, disrupting its ability to travel in time. The white dust is confined harmlessly to the present.
For the Bettys, there is no memory immune system. They remember what it was like. All their memories remember what it was like. Their future remembers what it was like.
So are you a Betty or a Dave? Either you’ll try it and forget about it, or you’ll try it and forget about everything else. I’m 100 percent Betty. Full-grown, meat-eating, red-blooded Betty. I mean white-blooded. And the stuff was white this first time. It came in a little vial with a white top. That was the “it” brand in Alphabet City that summer. Chip had done his research.
It might seem like I’m kind of obsessed by the first time I did dope. No shit. If you’re writing a book like this, and you don’t use at least this much space writing about the first time, you’re not being honest. That first time follows you around. It doesn’t stay in one place. It goes everywhere you go and does everything you do. In fact, my first time is here with me right now. Say hello, first time. Hello. A number of other people moved through the roof as afternoon turned into evening and then into night. Seth. Ann. Ashley, I think. Charlie, definitely. No one has ever said, “I went to a party the other night. I’m not sure if Charlie was there or not.” You’re always sure. Charlie was also living in New York for the summer. Like me, he should have graduated in May, but had another semester to go. He’d heard I was coming into town and came over. I remember his face rising over me like the moon.
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