There were excuses for everything. She didn’t have money, she hadn’t eaten in three days. So I brought her food, and was treated to a spectacular fiery temper tantrum for my troubles.
The new furniture was there. The mattress on the bed was already pockmarked with burn holes from her cigarettes, from her crack pipes. It was a wonder the whole place hadn’t burned down while she was in the kitchen cooking up another rock.
I found a television-cum-VCR on sale in the Want Advertiser and bought it for her; I brought it over to Natick with a bag of videos for her to watch and a bag of groceries. Once in a while I gave in to her insistence and drove her somewhere, usually up to Lynn or Revere. She was going further away to buy her coke, now. She had burned all the local dealers; at that point, there probably wasn’t a single one to whom she did not owe money. Unlike me, they were used to dealing with addicts; they could say no. It was unfortunate for Sophie that not everybody was willing to take it out in trade.
The reality was that I was watching her dying and she was asking me to help kill her. The night that I finally understood that, I stopped; it was one of the hardest things I ever had to do.
She had badgered and badgered me, calling every three minutes on the phone, just asking for a ride for which she would pay me if I couldn’t find it in my heart to do it for her out of friendship. Her words. So I had given in yet again and picked her up out in Natick and we set off for Lynn.
It was hardly the best of times. It was eleven o’clock at night, we were seriously lost, and it turned out that Sophie had no coherent idea of where we were going, just a vague assertion that she would recognize the house when she saw it, because she had been there the night before.
The night before, I had been up until nearly four in the morning with a client, I had had an eight-thirty class that morning, and I was in no mood for this bullshit. I handed Sophie my cell phone. “Call these people, get directions,” I said crossly. My patience was nearing the red line.
She looked at me blankly. “I don’t know their name. But I’ll know the house; let’s try some more streets.”
I took a steadying breath. As far as I could tell, she could have made a buy at any of the last six corners we had passed, had I agreed to it. To say that we were not in the best part of town would have been a severe exaggeration. “Sophie, you said that this wouldn’t take more than half an hour.”
“Well, that was what I thought,” she said, pouting. “Jen, just do it, okay? We’re here now.”
Not for long, I thought grimly. I gave it another ten minutes, and then bailed. “Sophie, this isn’t going to happen. I’m going home.”
“How can you do this to me?” It was a wail.
“How could you do this to me?” I countered. “Sophie, you’re using me, and I’ve had enough. Do you want me to leave you here, or take you home?”
“If we could just go down that street, I think that it is looking familiar…”
I whipped the wheel around and achieved a screeching of tires that I have never duplicated since. I took her home. I didn’t say a word, not when she was crying, not when she was begging. I waited in stony silence for her to get out of the car. I went home and didn’t pick up the telephone that kept ringing all night.
And, damn it, she had managed to clean my wallet out again, too.
I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t keep loving her and hating her at the same time.
I started saying, “I’m sorry, but I can’t talk to you,” when she called me. I made the payments on her furniture and was torn between anger at doing it, and intense sorrow that it hadn’t helped.
And even then, there was a very small part of me – the Peter Pan part of me that’s in all of us, the one that resists growing up and resents responsibility – part of me was jealous of her, closed in her apartment with the shades down, ignoring the real world, sucking that sweet intense oblivion from the crack pipe, and not feeling anything at all.
One of Peach’s girls once told me that she had tried coke, and didn’t like it. “It numbs you,” she said. “In every way. I was surprised how much it works on your heart as well as your brain. It takes away your capacity to feel anything. You just stop caring. You stop feeling. I don’t ever want to stop feeling.”
Yes; but she was young and healthy, with her whole life stretching out in front of her, full of mystery, excitement, promise, and hope. It’s easy, then, to want to feel.
On the other hand, she was right about the cocaine.
I stopped talking to Sophie, and eventually – after a seemingly endless time – she stopped talking to me. The last I heard before I left the business was that she was doing blowjobs in the doorways of apartment buildings down in the Fenway for a rock or two of crack.
I am writing these words years after all of this happened, and there are tears in my eyes as I write. My throat is burning, my stomach is tight: I still feel it. It’s as if we were survivors of a shipwreck, Sophie and I, and I tried to keep her afloat, and she sank anyway. I’m left wondering if there wasn’t something else I could have done to keep her there with me, on the surface, treading water, hoping to be rescued.
Of course, Andy was right when he said she wasn’t going down alone. If she could have, she would have taken me down with her.
Not because she hated me, but because she was indifferent to me. I had become for her a means to an end. She had lost the capacity to care. Her only love was the drug.
I have to tell you: I’m not sure that I’m stronger than Sophie was. I’m not better, and I’m not smarter. The only difference between us, maybe, is that I had a lighter load to carry through life.
I did not have to carry the memory of a father who tortured, of a mother who turned her back.
Or – I may still be making excuses for her.
I knew another woman who worked for Peach. She had been gang-raped when she was fifteen, survived an illegal abortion and a suicide attempt and three abusive relationships. She was doing drugs, and she got out. So perhaps it’s not about the size of the load, but about the size of one’s courage.
Or maybe it’s just about pure dumb luck.
If so, I was lucky, and Sophie wasn’t.
There’s hardly a day that goes by, even now, that I do not remember her. I hold many memories of that time in my life; but it is only Sophie who haunts my dreams, making me cry out in the night. My husband has become accustomed to my nightmares. He holds me close, and asks no questions.
A few years ago, I attended a seminar on drug abuse, and I learned precisely what cocaine does to your body. There’s a substance in your brain called dopamine, and dopamine is your friend: it’s what makes you feel good, happy, even sometimes elated. Your brain pretty much figures out how much of it to keep dropping into your system for you to stay in a good mood.
Cocaine comes in fast and hard and with a lot of intensity. It blocks the dopamine, but your brain doesn’t care, because the coke is so much better that the usual stuff. Who needs dopamine when they can have elation? But no one can stay high forever, and once you come down, so does your mood.
The catch is that in the meantime the dopamine producers have looked at your cocaine-induced euphoria, and they have decided that you don’t need anything else. So the production of dopamine slows and sometimes even stops, leaving you feeling a lot worse than you did before you decided to stick a straw up your nose. Not only has the cocaine high disappeared, you’ve also lost your normal baseline, your natural happiness.
The saddest reality of all is that you will never, ever, ever, feel as high as you did the first time you did the drug. You will keep believing that you can, that if you just have one more line, one more hit, everything will be fine… but you’re fighting chemistry. You’re fighting reality. Addiction is a story that can only have one ending.
Sometimes, the degree to which I flirted with it scares the shit out of me.
*
I think of Sophie, and I realize that there would never have been enough
of anything in the world to heal her. Not enough dopamine, not enough cocaine, not enough alcohol, not enough sex. Not enough friendship. Not even enough love
Chapter Eleven
The one thing in my life that I protected jealously from my difficult relationship with Sophie was my teaching. Even at the beginning, some sixth sense warned me not to let her get involved in that part of myself. I may not have seen her or what was happening to her as clearly as I might have; but at some level I understood that allowing her in any way to touch my other world, the academic world, would have been catastrophic. Even when I was spending evenings or afternoons with her, even during my brief flirtation with crack, I made sure that I could continue to teach.
I was lucky in that, too. Maybe that sixth sense was really the voice of Mary Magdalene, my (sort of) patron saint. I certainly can’t claim credit for it.
I was apparently to be rewarded for my efforts, though, because as it turned out, the class on prostitution was easily the most interesting class I’d ever taught.
I don’t say that lightly: I’ve had some really interesting experiences. I was a teaching assistant for two years at MIT, in the humanities department, and corrected papers written for classes called Mysticism and Gnosticism in Literature, and Evil as a Literary Theme. The papers had no assigned topics, and the sheer breadth of subject matter selected by the student authors was staggering. It’s hard to top those, and I have never since seen anything remotely like them. They stood out, even in that venue, where brilliance in the sciences appears to go hand in hand with a purposeful and studied weirdness.
But this one was shaping up to be even more of a fascinating experience.
Sometimes you see a pattern to enrollment in certain classes.
Every time that I taught On Death and Dying, for example, I knew that I would have to spend the first few sessions weeding out those who really shouldn’t be in the class. People who had just experienced a death and needed therapy rather than academic discussion.
People who dressed in black robes with long black fingernails. That sort of thing.
I anticipated that at least two groups of people would enroll in The History and Sociology of Prostitution. I anticipated feminists, women on a mission, coming to either denounce the topic as oppression or to argue for its legalization. I anticipated a certain number of students whose primary interest was prurient and who hoped to be able to talk about sex. I anticipated at least one Young Republican, gathering information on the issues that might ignite his or her way to the political arena. And I hoped I’d have a few people with genuine curiosity and open minds.
The opening class was the one that that would set the tone, which I planned to be one of low stress and good communication paired with significant learning. I should say here, right at the beginning, that I don’t believe in content-less classes, places where only discussion takes place. If that’s what you want, look for the nearest Starbucks. There has to be some reason for the hiring of educated and thoughtful people as university professors, and my participation as a resource and mentor is intrinsic to my teaching style.
So we did the usual touchy-feely introductions that actually are quite helpful to me, going around the room, each student saying who they are and why they chose this particular class. Then I said a few words about my own academic background, heard myself saying that I was considering writing a book about prostitution (the idea had just at that moment entered my mind), and added that, as a lecturer, I had no permanent office, that “office hours” are immediately before and after each class.
We went through the class syllabus together. I explained the various papers and projects for which they would be responsible, and pointed out the books that they had to purchase and read.
Then I spoke for a while about what we were going to be focusing on for the next four months. “Talking about sex is no longer the taboo that it used to be. But talking about prostitution, on the other hand, is taboo, that is, unless it’s in the context of a lewd remark or a dirty joke.”
I walked around the room. “What we’re going to be doing in class this semester is exploring both the history of prostitution – what forms it has taken over the centuries – and how the mainstream of society has interacted with it. Then we’ll look at its meaning in a more anthropological context. We’ll visit the ancient civilizations of the Mediterranean; we’ll go to China and Korea and South America. We’ll see how it flourished in every age throughout world history, and we’ll start to ask why. We’ll talk about the reasons that prostitution exists, why it is needed, and why it is reviled.”
One of the students was snickering quietly. I moved slowly around the room until I was standing directly behind him, then stopped and continued to speak. He quieted down immediately. I knew a thing or two about control. “We’re going to look at the place and meaning of prostitution in society, efforts to legalize and regulate it, and the different movements that have tried to get rid of it. We’re going to contrast prostitution as a career choice with prostitution as another word for slavery. We’re going to ask the questions that are uncomfortable and try to come up with a clear and unprejudiced concept of prostitution. I’d like to end this semester with everyone in this room having a sense of where you stand on the issue, based not on hearsay and your own vivid imaginations” (a ripple of nervous laughter flicked across the room; I had said it with some emphasis and a smile); “but on a dispassionate, academic study of the topic.”
I left feeling buoyant. The energy was positive. Several students had stayed after class to ask questions or share comments; it all boded well for the future. They were even already asking the right questions, some of them at least, already showing interest, involvement, and some openness.
That feeling I had, that buoyancy, that sparkle, that high – that’s why I teach. Not because I’m passionate about my subject area – after all, as an untenured lecturer at large, I was teaching classes that were fairly tangential to my subject area – but because of that connection that gets made when it all goes well. Because of the interest and energy that lights up students’ faces when material is presented to them in a way that gets past their defenses.
There are a lot of people who believe that the subject of one’s specialization must be the focus and the raison d’être for anyone aspiring to teach, but I firmly believe that if I can understand something, I can teach it – and in fact teach it well. The subject area is of somewhat lesser importance – it is in the act of teaching itself that my passion lies. In a sense, the subject matter is a means to an end.
Which is not to say that there aren’t subjects that I prefer to teach. I’m not sure that I could generate the same amount of excitement around a software application class as I can around issues that I have spent years studying. But in a real sense, in the real academic world, the significance of those years and that study has been greatly exaggerated.
Let’s face it. If you enjoy school at all, then staying for more advanced degrees makes all the sense in the world. In high school, you study what somebody else decides that you should study. College offers more choices, you get to narrow your field of study to a general area that you like – but there are still those pesky required courses that have nothing to do with you and in which you have absolutely no interest. A master’s degree allows you to refine your classes still more; in my case, for example, I was able to take nothing but classes relating to anthropology. Yet even within that concentrated field you long for even more specialization. I wanted to study people in the real world, yet my Course of Studies dictated three classes in archaeology. Not as horrible as the torture I endured in my undergraduate math courses, but still not riveting.
It is not until you arrive at the doctoral level that all of your classes become passionately interesting to you, speaking directly to the issues that you care about. Two years of that, then your comprehensive examinations, and finally comes the ultimate specialization; the dissertation.
You must write about something
that no one has ever written about before. So you do. It gets you what you need: your degree, and a topic that you can pursue in terms of the journal articles and conference lectures that are de rigeur for advancing in your field; but, honestly, it’s not going to make a teacher out of you. The topic of my dissertation was The Role of Immediate Family Members in Rites of Passage. Not, you will note, a subject that everyone would find fascinating. Not something likely to inspire scintillating cocktail-party conversation. So while you may have become an expert on a small, infintesimally tiny area of your field, you’ll never be called upon to teach it. What you will teach are the courses that you took so long ago that they are all but forgotten: Anthropology 101. Introduction to Anthropology. The Origins of Humanity.
In case I’m sounding too altruistic, let me add that I also love teaching because of the way it makes me feel. Connecting with a student, changing him or her forever, even in the most infinitesimal of ways, helping him or her find out something important… it makes you feel that you can fly. There’s no drug that can touch that feeling. Nothing is better.
Not even freebasing. Odd how, after having taken the crack pipe into my hands and into my life, everything got compared to it. But a crack high is tenuous, uncertain, even sometimes frightening. This high was different. This high empowered and enabled. It had as much to do with what I was giving as it had to do with what I was taking.
*
I had an appointment with one of Peach’s clients at four, so I just had time to go home, shower, and change – he liked jeans, the casual look. He lived south on 128, in Needham, one of Boston’s white-bread suburbs that was still trying to convince itself that American flags on the streets and specialty grocery stores will hold outsiders at bay indefinitely. Outsiders are defined, of course, as anybody who is not white, preferably Protestant, and making a minimum of eighty thousand a year.
Callgirl: Confessions of a Double Life Page 16