The Weight of Air

by David Poses

  In Holyoke, Henry says he knows a dealer with fatter, purer bags than Arianne’s guy. I give him the same song and dance I told her about not wanting to go inside.

  “Whatever floats your boat, kid.” He gets out of the car.

  After we score, I drop Henry at a rooming house by I-91 in Northampton. Then I go home and shoot up for the first time in three and a half years.

  As I push down on the register and the dope rushes into my vein, I know this is no longer a vacation.

  At noon on Mondays and Fridays, when Henry gets off work at an industrial supply place in town, we go to Holyoke to cop. I drive. He handles the transaction and gets a bag from each bundle I buy. Two weeks into our partnership, he asks why I always have money. I tell him I sold a screenplay to Woody Allen.

  “Guy who played the bartender on Cheers?”

  “That’s Woody Harrelson.”

  “Your movie got a lot of explosions and shit?”

  “Long on explosions, short on shit.”

  “Kid, you are one funny-ass motherfucker.” He laughs himself into a coughing fit, pounds his chest, and rolls down the window and spits a gob of brown phlegm. It splatters on my back window. “Sorry. I’ll get it when we stop.”

  “You’ve been coughing a lot lately. Have you been to a doctor?”

  “Kid, I ain’t been to no doctor since I was twelve years old.”

  “Why?”

  “Too chickenshit, I guess.”

  After nearly a month, you wouldn’t know I’m an intravenous heroin user from looking at my arms. I avoid track marks by using clean needles (ultra-fine gauge BD brand, free at a local needle exchange) and applying an occasional cold compress.

  Rick from Smith Barney is more bearish about Silicon Graphics and recommends liquidating the rest of my shares.

  “Take the cash you need,” he says. “We’ll reinvest the rest later.”

  As Rick explains capital gains taxes, I stop paying attention when he gets to the part about not having to pay the IRS until next April. No chance I’ll be alive then.

  August comes out of nowhere. I wake up in a panic on the first of the month. I still don’t have a screenplay or an idea, and I’m worried about going back to school and kicking. I’m not really paying attention as I dump a bag and a half into a spoon and mix it with water. I wrap a belt around my bicep, make a fist, and push the needle in. It hurts—a skin-popped shot. A big purple bruise immediately forms. I wrap it with a cold towel and lay on the hardwood floor in the sun porch, listening to James’ “Five-O” over and over.

  When Jane gets home, I show her the bruise and make up a story about selling books to the used bookstore in town. “I almost fell down the stairs carrying the box to the car.”

  “You were distracted, weren’t you? Thinking about your script?”

  “You know me.”

  Jane looks me over. “You’re way too skinny and pale. We gotta fatten you up and get you outside more.”

  Knowing she’s meeting Frank to work on the photo show later, I propose a long walk, followed by a romantic dinner for two. She throws her arms around my neck and coos.

  “Aww, you’re so sweet. I feel terrible. I have to meet Frank later.”

  Henry isn’t outside. I run into the boardinghouse, fully expecting a nice old lady at a brightly lit front desk to bow her head and say somberly, “Henry was a real salt-of-the-earth type of guy.” But there’s no nice lady or front desk.

  Why did I think there would be in a building whose exterior appears to have been hit by a tornado and left to rot?

  The long, dimly lit corridor reeks of pot, cigarettes, cigars, and crack, with undertones of piss. “PUSSY” is scrawled in permanent marker in multiple places on the peeling wood veneer. Halfway down the hall, two long-haired guys stand by a pay phone with no receiver. I ask if they know which room is Henry’s.

  “Who the fuck’s Henry?” says the short, husky guy with a shark’s tooth necklace.

  “Forty, maybe fifty, tall, skinny guy.”

  “Oh, Big Bird. Yeah, his room’s, uh, last on the right. No. Left. Second to last.”

  The hallway seems to get narrower, like the entrance to Willy Wonka’s factory. The last door on the left is open. Henry is sitting on a twin bed, a can of Miller Light between his legs.

  “Henry? Henry? Hennnnn-reeeeeeeeeee.”

  Henry squints in my direction and waves me in. The smell from a pine tree–shaped car air freshener overwhelms the room, which is smaller than the smallest of the three closets in my childhood bedroom. A dark wood dresser has the same snowflake carvings and curved edges as the nightstand.

  “Noon already?” Henry says. “Sorry, kid.” He sweeps an old digital watch off the nightstand, looks at it with heavy eyes, and thwaps it against his leg. “Damn battery.”

  “Ready to go?”

  “I can’t do no more dope, kid. They’re starting random drug tests at work.”

  He opens another beer and snickers as foam races over the lip and down the brown metal bed frame into a crack in the linoleum floor.

  “How about one last hurrah before—”

  “Kid, my ass is grass if they catch me.”

  My mind spinning, I turn and see beat-up paperbacks on a shelf. Raise the Titanic. Dianetics. Tommyknockers. It. Some spines have Dewey decimal numbers.

  “What if I give you money instead of dope?”

  “Kid . . .”

  At the door, I almost stop and ask him to exchange phone numbers and addresses. But I don’t know Henry’s last name, and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t remember my first.

  When I reach Arianne and Roy’s campsite, the tent is gone. A plastic shopping bag is stuck to a tree branch and flails in the breeze. The ground is littered with empty, crushed packs of generic cigarettes. Fuck.

  Back on the trail, I follow the loop and yell out, “ARIANNE? ROY? AIRY-AAAAANNNNNE?”

  I’m wearing shorts, a T-shirt, and Birkenstocks. The temperature cools as the sun starts to set. Ten more minutes and then I’ll leave. An hour later, I’m still searching, my bloodied legs teeming with thorns and burrs. I can’t hear cars. I don’t see the trail.

  Wandering aimlessly in the moonlight, I happen upon Roy passed out in a sleeping bag. I say his name and poke him with a stick until his eyes finally open. “Oh, hey, man.” Sitting up, he stretches and takes a whiff of his armpit.

  “Is Arianne around?”

  “Bitch went back to her mom’s house. Took the tent too.”

  “Are you up for a drive to Holyoke? I’ll buy you a bag.”

  “Sheeeee-it, motherfucker. Does the Pope shit in the woods?”

  Roy slides out of the sleeping bag and straps on his fanny pack. I take a step toward where I think the trail is. He laughs. “Nope. You wait here and keep an eye on my shit. Dealer’s kinda skittish.”

  I reach into my pocket, peel a twenty-dollar bill off the wad, and hand it over.

  “Won't be long,” he says.

  As he disappears into the dense, dark woods, I think he’s not coming back. I think I knew that when I found him. I think I found him so I’d get ripped off and be forced to kick, the cherry on top of a shit sundae.

  Sitting on the ground with my back against a tree, I pull my arms through my sleeves, stretch my shirt over my knees, and make a mental list of supplies for a kick. Orange juice. Nestle’s Crunch bars. Vanilla ice cream. NyQuil. Hopefully the diphenhydramine knocks me out and I sleep through the worst.

  Flies and gnats swarm my face, and mosquitoes feast on my ankles. All this is happening because of screenplay stress. I picture myself telling Jane my laptop crashed. In a fit of rage, I’ll throw it out the window. No one will know the script never existed.

  I'm about to go home when a flashlight shines in the distance. Leaves rustle. Roy appears and takes a bow.

  “Ta-da. Didn’t think I’d come back, did you?”

  “Pffft, I trust you.”

  My bag, individually sealed in plastic, is stamped “Bu
bonic Plague.” As we fix our shots, Roy brags about his God-given gift for stealing syringes from pharmacies. “You give the lady behind the counter a sob story about your diabetic grandma and they hand ’em over. Then alls you do is walk straight the fuck out without paying.”

  I’m high before Roy removes his sneaker, a filthy New Balance with the sole flapping off, and stabs the syringe into a vein on his foot.

  “Shit, man,” he says. “The fuck’re my manners?” He pulls two rubbing alcohol wet naps from his fanny pack and extends his hand. I take one and wipe the inside of my elbow.

  Roy pats his neck and gushes about the cooling power of rubbing alcohol. “Some spic told me about this shit on the golf course.”

  “You’re a golfer?”

  “What? Fuckin’. Man, I’m a goddamn caddy. I look like a stuck-up, golf-playing Jew bastard to you? You see horns coming out my head?”

  The next morning, I return to the woods in the rain. Roy is standing on a rock, holding a garbage bag over his head and sucking his tongue and cheeks.

  “You want to score?”

  “Pope shit in the woods?”

  We drive into town. I give Roy $200, and he drops his hands below the dashboard, fans the bills, and counts them aloud four times. “Okay, boss,” he says. “Back in twenty.”

  OK Computer plays from start to finish before Roy jumps into the car, out of breath. “This shit’s the fuckin’ shiznit.” He tosses me two bundles of bags stamped “In Cold Blood.”

  Reaching into his fanny pack, he takes out five blackened stems. “Yep, Roy hooked your ass the fuck your ass the fuck uuuuup.” He bites open a small clear plastic bag of crack, loads a stem, heats it, and starts puffing.

  “Would the dealer sell five or six bundles at once? I want to load up before I go back to school.”

  “Man, shit. This ain’t commemorative coins from the Franklin fuckin’ Mint, man.”

  Dave and Ana’s wedding is in five days, and I have half a bag, no screenplay, and a date to meet Roy in town in a few hours for the big buy. I pace around the apartment while Jane is in the kitchen, shuffling through index cards. Without looking up, she says I seem stressed.

  “It’s the script. I wish I had more time.”

  “You’re such a perfectionist. I’m sure it’s great as is.”

  I open and close drawers and cabinets in the kitchen and slip a spoon in my pocket. I tell Jane I’m going to take a shower. I turn on the water and push the door until it makes a clicking sound.

  As the water heats, I undress and stare at myself in the mirror until the steam obscures my reflection. Then I step into the tub and prep the shot on the edge. I load the chamber and lean out and shove the bag and spoon into my jeans pocket. I make a fist. The vein won’t pop. It’s there, beneath my skin, taunting me.

  I pull my belt off my jeans, loop it around my arm, and hold the end with my teeth. The needle goes in smoothly once the vein is ready for business. I push the register. Blood seeps out. I bend my elbow, raise it to my mouth, and lick it.

  Jane knocks. “Housekeeping,” she says, in a Scottish accent.

  I silently lower the belt to the rug and say “Come in” in a Scottish accent.

  The door opens. “I’m so stressed out,” Jane says. “I have so much work to do if I’m going to graduate in December.” I watch her shadow move across the creamy white shower curtain. After a long pause, she says, “I’m so jealous of you, the way you put your mind to something and it always works out.”

  Blood drips down my arm onto the shower floor. I kick it into the drain.

  “I’m starting to think you’re a robot,” she says. “If I pull this curtain back, am I going to see a bunch of metal and wires?”

  Scalding hot water pelts my body, frozen with fear as Jane’s fingers creep around the flimsy piece of nylon separating her—and me—from the truth. I press the needle against a shampoo bottle and close my eyes. With a sigh, she lets go of the curtain and leaves.

  “Might take a little longer ’n usual, boss,” Roy says. He’s uncharacteristically jovial, which makes me nervous. I slip $500 in twenties and fifties into his hand and think I might have a heart attack when he tucks the cash into his pocket without counting it.

  “So this is it, huh?” he says. “Last call?”

  “Whaaaat?”

  “You said you was going back to school. You’re quits.”

  “I’m not . . . School’s less than an hour away. I’m stockpiling in case I can’t get back here so fast. I told you, remember?”

  Roy wags his tongue from side to side. He knows I’m lying. He’s going to rip me off. I never said I was coming back. I should have. Fuck.

  “Aw, man. Shit,” he finally says, knocking on his head. “You know what? Fuckin’, you did say that fuckin’ shit, didn’t you?” He starts toward Pleasant Street and turns the corner.

  Three hours later, no Roy. I go home empty-handed.

  twenty-four

  The feeling is at once familiar and foreign: an electric current coursing through my body as an army of ants march up and down my spine. It intensifies until dawn, when my legs start twitching uncontrollably and I’m drenched in sweat and freezing cold, sitting on the toilet with my head in a plastic trash bin, a miasmic stew of shit and piss and puke. On top of the putrid stench, a certain odor seeps from my pores. Impossible to describe, though not necessarily awful. I’ve smelled this way only during withdrawal.

  The air is a frozen razor, slicing my tight, wet skin. I’m exhausted but I can’t sleep. More ants. More electrocutions. Zap. My arms and twitching legs are tied to four horses walking slowly in opposing directions. Zap. Muscle spasms. Zap. My skin burns and stings. Zap. Legs twitch. Zap. It hurts when I move and it hurts when I don’t. Zap. Take that, motherfucker. And that. ZAP!

  My eyes finally close. They open when something warm and moist grazes my forehead. Jane is kissing me. How long was I asleep?

  “Oh. My. God. Baby, you’re so sweaty. We need to get you to the hospital. This is worse than when you got sick from sushi.”

  It takes me a moment to remember—a month or so ago, when I spent most of the day in the bathroom, blaming the sushi place for the diarrhea I pretended to have when I was constipated—the only time anyone ever lied about having diarrhea.

  “Can I get you something?”

  “NyQuil.”

  Jane turns on the TV and leaves. I see the remote, but I can’t move. The sun is burning holes into my retinas while I’m stuck watching a Don Lapre infomercial. A smiley middle-aged couple in a McMansion brag about the money they’re making.

  “All we did was place tiny ads in local newspapers, and now we’re getting checks for twelve hundred, six hundred, thirty-two hundred—thanks to Don Lapre’s proven money-making system that you, too, can take advantage of right now by calling the toll-free number at the bottom of your screen.”

  Jane returns with NyQuil liquid capsules and ginger ale and straws. While she’s in the kitchen, I free six pills from plastic tamper-resistant cells and pop them into my mouth and bite. The diphenhydramine-infused menthol goo drips down my throat.

  “I thought you’d want a red straw,” she says, guiding it to my mouth. “I would have stirred out the bubbles like my mom used to when I had a tummy ache, but I can’t find any of our spoons. Have you seen them?”

  I shake my head.

  “They were my grandmother’s.”

  I can’t imagine hating myself more, wrapped in blankets heavier than concrete, curled up in the fetal position, and Jane sitting next to me, stroking my wet hair.

  “Do you want to be watching Don Lapre?”

  I grunt.

  Jane channel surfs to Awakenings. Robert De Niro is ostensibly lifeless until Robin Williams shows up with the special sauce. Once De Niro awakens, Williams administers it to other patients. Everyone rejoices—doctors, patients, families—until we learn the special sauce isn’t a permanent solution. Then it’s a tearjerker as the collective faces the pro
spect of returning to the way things were.

  Bags and boxes fill the living room. I close my eyes. When they open, most of the boxes are gone. Jane stands by the window, glistening with sweat in a loose white V-neck, an angel in the sun.

  “You can’t go to the wedding in this shape.”

  “I’ll be better by Saturday.”

  “It is Saturday.”

  Jane helps me down the stairs and into the car. Every bump and turn is a sledgehammer to my head and my stomach. I look for Roy until the I-91 entrance ramp. Then I close my eyes and make a silent plea to the universe. Please, let me get through this and I’ll never go near heroin again. Please help me. Save me. Take care of me. Make this all go away. I know I don’t deserve it, but please get me out of this fucking hole.

  This semester—our last before graduating—Jane and I are sharing a cottage on campus with a couple of friends. When we arrive, I drag myself into the shower and crank the heat. I cough up gobs of yellow goo as the small rectangular enclosure fills with steam and water blazes toxic sweat from my body. For the first time in who knows how long, I wash my hair and lather my entire body with soap—even the spaces between my toes.

  I reach for a towel and wrap it around my waist. I don’t know whose it is—white with parrots in black motorcycle jackets. They’re holding cans of Coors Light, except the one in the middle, whose wing is extended like a hand and he’s giving you the finger. On the bottom: “Tap the Rockies and give them the bird.”

  My seersucker suit looks surprisingly respectable after a summer in a duffel bag. I ease my body into it, put on my wing tips, and check myself out in the full-length mirror on the back of the door. No, not the image I want to project. I take off the wing tips and put on my slightly dirty white Rod Lavers with green trim and red shoelaces. Perfect—serious and funny. Ingmar Bergman and Groucho Marx. Woody Allen.

  I tell myself to remember to stand up straight and make eye contact. I hear Apollo Creed from the Rocky movies: “You can do this, champ. You’re the champ, champ. Eye of the tiger, baby. Eye of the tiger.” I throw punches in the mirror, hum-singing “Eye of the Tiger.” Bamp. Bamp bamp bamp. Bamp bamp boom. Bamp. Boop. Pooka chocka, pooka chocka, pooka chocka. Risin’ up. Deedle-dee-dee.