by Bill Clegg
As I’m getting off the call she says in the sternest voice I’ve ever heard her speak in, Enough is enough, you’ve got to stop this. Stop it right now. Do you hear me? Enough is enough. As much as I had dreaded the phone call, this last instruction, this line drawn, by my mother of all people—this girl-woman my sister and I took care of as kids, whom I’ve defended my whole life and avoided most of my adulthood—feels like something I’ve been missing for a long time but hadn’t realized until now. Like how you don’t know how hungry you’ve been until you see food, or how tired you are until your head hits a pillow.
Annie walks me back to The Library and hugs me good-bye. I agree to call her before going to sleep and rush into the building to catch the last half hour of the two o’clock meeting. I manage to get a seat next to Polly, who makes well-look-who-showed-up eyes at me. Asa is there, looking tired from being awake most of the night before. After the meeting he tells me matter-of-factly that he’s spending the night again at my place and that he’ll pick me up there to go to the Meeting House at six. All I can manage is Thank you.
Polly slaps me in the head and says, What the fuck, Crackhead? We walk to the dog run and I tell her what happened. She listens and nods and is in no way surprised. Just keep coming back and next time, call me, OK? I promise you won’t want to use once I’m through with you. She comes over to my place for a while until Asa shows up. Asa and I go to the Meeting House and come back to my place afterward and eat quiche and roast chicken from the bags of food from Jean that arrived while we were out. While Asa unfolds the pullout bed from the couch, I call Jack to give an accounting of the day—the meetings, talking to Polly and Annie and Asa, apologizing to my mother, counting one day at The Library—to which he responds, Do it all again tomorrow. After I say good night and hang up the phone, Asa turns off the lights and we crawl under our respective covers. Benny curls against the door, as far from me as possible.
I can’t sleep. Can’t help but run through the events of the last three days. Everything that followed the phone call to Happy—the bad high, the good high, the Asian guys, the broken stems, the vodka, the ruined lighters, the paranoia, the thoughts of suicide—is familiar, follows the same desperate script of every time using. But what’s different, what is completely new, is what happens after. I realize that from the moment I ran into Asa on the street twenty-four hours ago, I have not been alone. After Asa I’m with Annie and after Annie with Polly and now, again, with Asa, who is asleep on my pullout couch.
I lie in bed, awake, in the dark. I can make out the edges of the white sheet that I’d nailed to the wall above the terrace door to cover its small window. One of the corners has come off and I watch it flap against the door, making shapes and movements that remind me of the cops and DEA agents I was convinced were lining up on the terrace two nights ago. I curl against the window next to the bed and try to blink away the thoughts of what would have happened without Asa. I remember him sitting across from me at the New Venus diner on my first night back in the city, how I had no intention of going with those boys to dinner, how Jack made me, and how it was Asa who told me to meet him the next day at The Library, which was where I met Polly and Annie. How are these people, whom I didn’t know less than a month ago, how are they now the most important people in my life? My mind races with how unlikely it all seems, how arbitrary.
The room and the city outside are quiet. I listen to the sound of Asa’s rough breathing and look out the window to the Empire State Building. The old skyscraper goes dark at midnight, as usual, but as it does this time the remaining lights in the skyline appear to blink awake, shine with new energy, as if each one has agreed now to shoulder the heavy burden of lighting the city, pick up the slack as one of their own tires out, realizes that he cannot, could never, do it on his own.
Use
Polly has eight days and I have five. Though neither of us can put together longer than two weeks, we talk about what we’ll do when we reach ninety. Polly may go back to teaching or working with animals. I have no idea what I’ll do—little seems possible, and as my bank account thins and my debt thickens, the only solution seems to be to go live with my sister Kim in Maine. What I’ll do there I can’t imagine. How long she and her family would tolerate me is also unclear. Polly has a different predicament. Her sister Heather somehow lucked into their rent-controlled apartment on St. Mark’s Place when she was in graduate school and the rent, by New York standards, is practically free. So there’s less pressure on Polly to make money, but if Heather doesn’t get sober it’s not a place Polly’s sponsor or anyone else at The Library recommends she remain. Her attachment to Heather is powerful—they are twins and using buddies—and up until recently, anytime I or anyone else suggests she move out Polly goes cold and swiftly changes the subject. But Heather continues to do lines of coke and stay up all night watching DVDs of Law & Order. Polly puts a few days together and, this time, becomes more open to talking about moving. By mid-May she begins mentioning—tentatively, cautiously—that she might look on Craigslist for apartments in Queens, which she’s heard are cheap.
And then Polly disappears. She doesn’t show up at either the 12:30 meeting or the two o’clock. I call and leave messages on her cell phone but get no answer. This goes on for days until her voice mail is full and stops accepting messages. I walk down St. Mark’s and linger in front of her building, hoping to see her or Heather. Jack tells me not to buzz the apartment because I’m not even a week sober and there could be coke all over Polly’s place. As much as I agree with his logic, there is no part of me that finds getting high with Polly appealing. There is no part of the prospect of coke in her apartment that triggers a craving. But I follow Jack’s rules, even though I’m terrified she has overdosed. I call her sponsor, who says she hasn’t heard from Polly but that someone from The Library saw Heather on the street, who said she’s OK and to let her be.
So I do. The meetings at The Library for the rest of the week seem strange without Polly. The afternoons are more spacious. I go to coffee with Annie after the two o’clock meeting a few times, but it’s odd not to go to the dog run, odd to be home for the beginning of the Oprah show at four o’clock each day. The weekend rolls around and Saturday morning, on a whim, I call Polly. Miraculously, she answers. Hey, Crackhead, she says, without the usual pluck, and I say, lamely, If that’s not the pot calling the crackhead black then I don’t know what is. She laughs but her voice is rough and weak. You OK? I ask, and after a long pause she says, Nope. She agrees to meet me at the dog run, and when she finally shows up nearly forty-five minutes late I see that she is, as she often is after using, still wearing her pajamas. She’s got a sweatshirt over the tissue-thin, unwashed nightclothes, but I can see her collarbone jutting from her skin and her movements are labored. She looks as though she’s lost ten pounds, and there weren’t ten to lose. She has Essie’s dog leash in one hand and a cigarette in the other, and when she sits down next to me I catch a strong whiff of alcohol, body odor, and cigarette smoke. I struggle not to react, but she’s ripe and it’s not easy to appear as if I don’t notice.
How she smells is obviously the furthest thing from her mind. I’ve seen Polly after using a number of times, but something is different now. She seems startled by something more than the now familiar horror of having relapsed. I ask her what happened and she tells me that Heather came home with two eight balls Monday night and they used round the clock until Thursday night. On Friday, Heather’s dealer comes by with another eight ball and the two of them dive in. After a few lines, Heather starts to complain of heart pains and lies down on the sofa. Polly is worried but does a few more lines. At some point, Heather passes out and Polly tries, unsuccessfully, to wake her up. She shakes her, splashes water on her face, and shouts her name, but nothing works. She checks for a pulse and feels Heather’s heart beating in her chest so she knows she’s alive. She must have overdosed, Polly realizes, as she does a big line to kill off her rising panic. When that doesn’t work, she do
es another. There’s almost an entire eight ball sitting on the coffee table, and when she thinks of calling the ambulance, she knows that when someone comes she’ll have to go to the hospital with Heather. And stop using. She keeps doing line after line, thinking she’s about to call 911, but each time the high doesn’t last and soon she needs another line. She keeps thinking she’ll call after one more. After two and a half hours or so of this, the eight ball is not gone, Heather is still unconscious, and Polly freaks out and finally calls 911. The paramedics come, get Heather to the ER, pump her system clean, and she stays the night. Polly leaves Heather at the hospital once the doctor says she’s going to be fine. She goes back to their apartment, finishes the eight ball, drinks vodka, and takes sleeping pills until she passes out. Late that morning, Heather comes home, and soon after that, I call. And here we are, in the dog park. Something has to change, she says, shaking her head. I chose coke over my sister’s life.
Out of the blue, I remember a small rehab called High Watch in Kent, Connecticut, which is an old Twelve Step retreat that has meetings all day and is, I think I remember someone telling me once, cheap. On the park bench in the dog run we call information and get a person on the phone. There’s a bed open on Monday and the daily rate is, with help from Polly’s parents, manageable. She reserves the bed, commits to staying two weeks, and the next phone call is to my mother. Without giving it more than a moment’s thought, I dial her number, and when she picks up I explain the situation. She agrees to meet us at the train station near Kent on Monday morning. When she asks if I’ll spend the night, I lie and say that I have a commitment at a meeting that evening and need to return to the city. Between the phone call on the bench at the dog run and getting on the train Monday morning, Polly calls her parents and tells them what’s been going on. It’s the first they hear that she’s been using drugs, and it’s the first they hear that Heather has, too. They live in California and don’t see their daughters very often. Somehow Polly’s years of unemployment have not sounded alarm bells loud enough to make them think there is a serious problem. She asks them for help in paying the fee at the rehab and they agree. Of course there is a huge blowup with Heather, who denies everything to their parents and tells Polly that once she’s left for rehab she can stay there or move back to California, but she’s not welcome in her apartment anymore. Polly goes anyway.
We meet early Monday morning on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 14th Street, and Polly arrives with a small duffel bag. A friend has agreed to watch Essie, and as we get on the Metro North train to Wassaic, Polly says she hasn’t been out of the city in three years. On the ride up, she tells me terrible but hilarious stories of getting smashed before teaching kindergarten and being completely bewildered when the other teachers at the school don’t want to meet her around the corner for a drink on their lunch break. She, like me, has a few airport stories. One of the most vivid is one from her college years, when she leaves a bar one afternoon, hammered, and shows up at JFK airport with no idea where she is going to go, just that she’s going somewhere, anywhere. She sees that a flight to Sarajevo is leaving later that night and books a ticket. She gets there with little money, just enough to sit in cafés all day and have drinks bought for her. I sat there thinking I was so interesting, drinking in cafés in a country going to war. People were going off to die and I was feeling glamorous, fascinating. As if somehow the war had more to do with me than them. Her story triggers a memory of my mother’s battle with cancer. I remember telling friends that she was dying as I drank vodka after vodka, as if her sickness was impacting me more than her. I cringe with shame when I think about that time and, later, when I turned up at the hospital the day of her surgery after I’d been up the night before smoking crack.
We arrive at the Wassaic train station and the only car in the lot is my mother’s. I can see her through the windshield of her Honda station wagon. Only when she steps out of the car toward the platform to greet us do I realize that I have not seen her in over a year. Six years since her radical mastectomy and five years since she completed a year of radiation treatments, her hair has returned, much thinner and lighter in color than before. As Polly gathers up her duffel bag and says heavily, Here we go, whatever difficulties I have with my mother don’t matter.
The rehab is beautiful, which none of us expects. It looks like an expensive bed and breakfast one would go to for a weekend getaway from the city. The women who admit Polly are friendly and the place seems mostly empty. We walk across the property to where Polly will be sleeping, and as she puts her duffel on the bed, it only then occurs to me that she won’t be in the city for two weeks. Two weeks with no dog run, no Polly. I have a flash of panic about relapsing, that without Polly around I’ll somehow be less able to keep from picking up. I hope none of these thoughts register on my face as I hug Polly good-bye and walk glumly away as if I’m leaving my daughter at college. I want people to like her, worry she’ll be lonely. Call me if you need to, anytime, I say pathetically as I leave her room to go.
My mother takes me back to the station to catch a train that leaves less than two hours after Polly and I arrived. As she drives, we don’t talk about the silver or anything else that’s been hard between us. She tells me that when I was in college she threw my father out of the house after a particularly ugly drunken scene. She agreed to let him come home only if he completed a stay at the rehab where we just left Polly, which, apparently, he did. I’m surprised by the story. I knew things had gotten bad between them while I was in college, that his drinking had escalated, but I had no idea that he’d gone to rehab. I listen as she describes how hard that time was, but I’m reluctant to get too engaged. I’m just now talking again with my father, after not speaking for nearly a decade, so I’m cautious about getting too deep into the old familiar dynamic of listening to my mother complain about him. My father is an early riser, always was, so over the last few weeks we’ve been talking in the mornings. I’ve been meeting Elliot at the tennis courts along the West Side Highway before he goes to work, so I get there early to reserve a court and call my father. It feels as if I am getting to know him for the first time on these calls. As my mother talks more about my father’s drinking, I get more and more uncomfortable and eventually I change the subject.
We pull into the train station and wait awkwardly in the car. She asks about Polly’s sister and The Library, tries, like any parent, to get a glimpse of her child’s life. I answer vaguely, reluctant to include her in any of it, and eventually just say, Thank you. It is quiet in the car for some time. I’m happy I could help, Billy. I’m just glad I can be of use, she says tenderly as the train pulls up and I reach for the door. Me, too, I think as I kiss her on the cheek, leave the car, and go home.
Goners
Jack asks me to meet him at a coffee shop on Irving Place. It’s only a few blocks from my usual stomping grounds of Union Square, lower Fifth Avenue, and east Chelsea, but as I walk along the tall fences of Gramercy Park, it strikes me how small I’ve made the city again—how limited the terrain I travel, how predictable. As I’m about to cross up to Lexington from the top of the park I see a navy blue tracksuit with maroon stripes along the sleeves and pants. I see the tracksuit first and then the short, bearded, wiry, gold-ringed, Ray-Ban-clad kid wearing it. Lotto. Lotto is in lieu of Lowt, an old Jewish name given to Lotto by his old Jewish parents, who own and run a diamond store in the West 40s. Lotto was adopted as an infant, his parents are in their seventies, and he grew up in a town house on Gramercy Park that could double as an embassy. Last I heard he was at the Betty Ford Center in California. He’s the kid I met over a year ago in Oregon at the rehab Noah and Kate sent me to. Then it was Lotto’s ninth or tenth rehab. Now he’s been to at least two more. In Oregon, Lotto resisted every suggestion, every instruction, and managed to alienate nearly every counselor and patient in the rehab. In clothes, language, and manner, he’s hip-hop ghetto meets Italian mobster. He’s the lippiest, most foul-mouthed, most confrontational kid I
’ve ever met and also one of the funniest. In Oregon, we became friends. We’d walk the grounds of the rehab at night before curfew and he’d tell me stories of smuggling drugs into and busting out of therapeutic boarding schools up and down the east and west coasts. He was, then, twenty-one to my thirty-three. Now, both a year older and still, it seems—given that he’s not at the Betty Ford Center, and I’m wearing shorts and a T-shirt on a weekday morning—not so much further along the road to recovery than when we last saw each other. I’d left the rehab in Oregon after completing five weeks in treatment; he left after going AWOL and secretly booking a ticket on my flight home to New York. Surprise, surprise, he had said at the airport, waving his boarding pass. Time to get the hell home.
Lotto spots me before I can say hi. Yo, Billeeee! he yells, more Gambino than Lansky. I notice that Lotto’s wearing the usual amount of gold but less beard and that he’s gained weight. He’s graduated from whippet thin to wiry. His tracksuit, no doubt the smallest size made, still pools around his expensive running shoes and falls off his body like curtains. You good? he asks, and I say I’m just fine, that I have a few days sober and am making a run at ninety days. Yo, I have ninety, he says, and I didn’t need that joke rehab to get ’em. Really, Lotto? I ask doubtfully. Ninety? He laughs and says, Nah, but I will.
I tell Lotto that I have to see my sponsor but he should meet me the next day at The Library. He gives me his new number—he’s had two that I know of since we met in Oregon. Each rehab asks him to get rid of his old cell phone, as they did with me, so he doesn’t have access to his dealers’ numbers. We agree to see each other at The Library at 12:30 but it will be three days before I hear from him. Let’s get dinner, he texts, and I suggest again that we meet at The Library. I don’t hear from him for a few days, so when he texts and suggests dinner again, I agree to meet him at a place in the far West Village—more of a lounge than a restaurant. When I get there he’s with three girls. All blond, all look like they’re in high school, all talking on or texting from their cell phones. Looks like a party, I say as I sit down, and Lotto smirks and says, What else is new? The girls are drinking champagne—Of course they are, I think. Lotto has a large bottle of Pellegrino in front of him. Bubbly? he jokes as he holds up the bottle. I nod yes and gesture toward the girls. He introduces me and they barely look up from their gadgets. A waiter comes, we order whatever we order, and when the girls all leave for the bathroom, Lotto tells me he’s in love. She’s a good girl, he says, and I ask which one of the three she is and he says, Oh no, not these bitches, they’re just friends. Tess is in art school and is in the studio tonight working on some sculpture or installation or something. I ask him where he met her and he tells me the story of how he spotted her at Barneys, followed her out onto Madison Avenue, and asked her to dinner. I try to picture the scene and have a hard time seeing how Lotto pulls off this kind of move, but then again he has three girls at dinner tonight so who knows. You’d like her, Billy, he says seriously. I know you would.