As Needed for Pain

by Dan Peres

He was running.

  So was I.

  He was surprisingly agile for an amputee. Much faster than I would have guessed. Or maybe I was far too slow for what the situation demanded. After all, it’s not easy to run for your life in a pair of Tod’s driving moccasins. Aptly named, if you ask me—they weren’t built for running. But then again, neither was I.

  “Get your bitch ass out of here,” he called.

  As I rounded the corner, Billy was leaning on the driver’s-side door of the limo smoking a cigarette and listening to one of his books on tape through the open window. Grenade was right behind me.

  “Hey,” yelled Billy.

  Grenade swatted at my leg with his crutches and connected with a loud clack. He stopped. I didn’t.

  I ran about fifty feet to the limo.

  “He’s gone,” Billy said. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. I was near tears.

  I got in the car and asked him to take me to my hotel.

  “What are you looking for?” Billy asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. “That guy was fucking crazy. Please just get me out of here.”

  “Listen,” said Billy, pulling away from the curb, “if you’re looking for something, I may be able to help.”

  He explained that he had a friend in San Diego who owned a pharmacy and that he was running a little side business for some special clients—including the rock star.

  “Can you get me Roxicodone?” I asked.

  “No problem,” he said. “How many do you want?”

  I Never Died

  I never died.

  I thought I might plenty of times. Like a matador stepping into the ring, I was oddly at peace with what could happen and smart enough to know that I might not make it out alive.

  But I always did.

  I’m probably going to die tonight.

  I must have said that to myself—sometimes even out loud—once or twice a week for years.

  This might kill me, but fuck it.

  I said that, too. A lot. I didn’t want to die. Or at least I don’t think I wanted to die. But I was willing to die. It seemed like an acceptable risk in pursuit of a bigger buzz. A higher high.

  I never died.

  As a boy, I was terrified of dying. Not in a normal “Hey, I don’t want to die” kind of way. Everyone was like that, I guess. No, my fear of death was a little more extreme and made me rather risk averse, to say the least. When I was nine or ten, some of the older neighborhood kids made a ramp out of a milk crate and a rotted two-by-four and tried to jump their dirt bikes—like Evel Knievel—over some younger kids whom they’d dared to lie on the street on the other side of the ramp. This sort of thing gave me anxiety and made me not terribly popular with the BMX set.

  “Someone’s going to get hurt,” I said.

  “Okay, Grandma,” one of the older kids called back.

  “Hey, Danny, your vagina’s showing,” yelled another.

  It didn’t help matters when I looked to make sure my fly wasn’t down.

  But I was right. Someone did get hurt that day. The bike didn’t even make it up the ramp and instead plowed the milk crate right into the seven-year-old stupid enough to lie there.

  “How’s my vagina now?” I yelled proudly.

  At twelve, I cut my finger while playing with my brother’s new Swiss Army knife and was sure I was a goner. We were at our dad’s house and I’d sneaked outside with the knife to carve a spear out of a small tree branch. The cut barely deserved a Band-Aid, but my blood-curdling shrieks brought a neighbor rushing over.

  “Please tell me I’m not going to die,” I pleaded. “Don’t let me die.”

  “I think you’ll survive,” she said, laughing.

  But in the spring of 1974, when I was two years old, I did almost die.

  It happened in Miami Beach. I was walking along the edge of the pool at the Carriage House on Collins Avenue when I dropped the small toy I was holding in the water and decided to go in after it.

  My family went to Florida for the holidays every year from the time I was a baby. The Carriage House was one of the glamorous beachfront apartment buildings that lined Collins Avenue and served as towering meccas for Baltimore Jews and Long Island Jews and Philadelphia Jews. We all looked the same, with our polo shirts and khaki shorts and Nikes, and we were distinguishable only by our regional accents and the license plates attached to the caravan of Caddies, Lincolns, and Mercedes-Benzes that made their way up and down the avenue.

  One afternoon I was playing around the pool and in I went. My brother Jeff, who was four at the time, saw me under the water and ran to tell my mother, who was on a chaise longue about a hundred feet away, playing backgammon with my grandmother. My mom has told me the story dozens of times. How I was sitting calmly at the bottom of the pool, toy in hand. How she screamed for help and a stranger dove in and scooped me up. How my brother had saved my life. How I could have died.

  But I didn’t.

  “You could have died last night,” the doctor said when we first spoke on the phone in early 2003.

  “You’ve been taking how many pills a day?” he asked after I just told him that I’d taken over twenty-five Roxicodone the day before. “It’s amazing that you’re still alive, Dan.”

  I was scared, but I also felt a sense of pride.

  I was uneasy about sharing my secret. I’d been lying to doctors for so long that it felt strange—unnatural, even—telling the truth. Lies had become my truths, and everything else felt fake—especially the truth.

  He told me to call him Dr. Ron and that he’d been featured on MTV as one of the pioneers of a rapid detox treatment for heroin and opiate addicts. I found him in the phone book. His ad mentioned the MTV special and had the same red As Seen on TV banner that I’d seen on various miracle cleaning products in the grocery store and the Pet Rock my father bought for me when I was a little boy. If I was going to get sober, the least I could do was pick a celebrity recovery doctor. A hint of glamour, I figured, made everything a little less miserable. My dentist, for example, cleaned the teeth of the stars. Signed pictures lined the walls of his Fifth Avenue office—supermodels and actors shaming me with their perfect gleaming grins and healthy gums. Flossers and midday brushers, for sure.

  “This sounds like a life-or-death situation, Dan,” Dr. Ron said. “I’d find a way to come today.”

  There were no photos of famous patients in Dr. Ron’s office. No celebrity endorsements or kind words of thanks scrawled in Sharpie across framed eight-by-tens. I’d taken a car service out to Connecticut, where he had a small office in Stamford. He split his time between there and an office in Manhattan, but if I wanted to see him immediately, he told me, I’d have to leave the city.

  He was alone when I got there. A tall, lean man who bore an uncanny resemblance to Martina Navratilova, Dr. Ron took both of my hands into his and guided me into to a chair in the waiting room. He had a small silver hoop in his left ear and wore black onyx Buddhist prayer beads on both wrists. Dr. Ron was built like a distance runner and struck me as the kind of lithe, veiny guy you’d find working at some smelly vitamin and health food shop in the Village.

  “You’re a doctor, right?” I asked.

  “Yes, I am, Dan,” he said.

  “Like a real doctor?” I said. “An MD? I don’t mean to be rude, but I just want to be sure.”

  “Yes, Dan. I’m a real doctor. You’ve come to the right place and I think I can help you, because you appear to be trying to help yourself.”

  He used my name often and spoke with the measured, eerily cheerful tone of a televangelist.

  “Based on what you told me over the phone, Dan, it’s likely you OD’d last night,” he said, sitting down next to me. “To put it even more plainly, you almost died last night.”

  “For real?” I asked.

  “It doesn’t get more real than this, Dan,” Dr. Ron said. “You’re very lucky your girlfriend was with you. She saved your life.”

>   I was being honest with him, but didn’t think it was necessary to tell him that my girlfriend was a call girl.

  “Wake up! Wake up! You’re not breathing.”

  Chickpea was on her knees on top of the covers shaking me when I opened my eyes. Her hands were gripped onto my left arm and shoulder, her face a few inches away from mine.

  “Jesus Christ!” she said. “I’ve been trying to wake you up for two minutes. Are you okay? You’re not breathing.”

  “I am now,” I said, taking a slow, deep breath and propping myself up in bed. I was dizzy. Dizzier than normal, anyway. I was used to being a bit unsteady on my feet when I was high. Sometimes when I woke up in the night to go the bathroom, I would stumble into the bedroom doorjamb or bump the already wobbly wooden nightstand I paid far too much for at the Clignancourt flea market in Paris. I would often pee sitting down to avoid falling or pissing all over the floor.

  It took a second for the time illuminated on the cable box’s digital display to come into focus. It was after two a.m. A Kevin Costner movie was playing muted on the TV. Chickpea was wearing my NYU hoodie and must have recently taken a hit from the small, colorful glass bowl she kept in her purse, because the bedroom smelled of pot.

  “You scared the shit out of me,” she said. “Fuck! You weren’t breathing. I thought you were dead. I didn’t know what to do.”

  I couldn’t help but think that maybe she knew exactly what to do if someone died in bed next to her. Occupational hazard, I figured. One night as we sat in front of the fireplace eating cold pizza she told me that her roommate, Misty, also a call girl with Elegant Affairs, was with a guy at the Four Seasons and she thought he was having a heart attack. He was a famous sportscaster, she told me, and in the middle of rolling around with Misty he went completely white, couldn’t catch his breath, and grabbed his chest. Ultimately he was fine, but according to Chickpea, Misty was seconds away from calling 911 and running for the door.

  “You were gasping for air,” Chickpea said. “Like you were trying to see how long you could hold your breath.”

  I couldn’t have been asleep for more than an hour before she woke me. The pills must have knocked me out. I’d always been something of a night owl, staying up until three or four in the morning watching TV or instructional magic videos or just smoking and sitting on the back deck.

  Chickpea got to the apartment after eleven p.m. that night and asked if I minded if she took a shower. Every time she came over, she immediately showered. I never gave any thought to what she was washing away. I didn’t care. We had a firm “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and it worked for us both. Until that night.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she asked after it became clear that—like Misty’s sportscaster—I wasn’t dying.

  What’s wrong with you?

  That question followed me like a vestigial tail.

  I’d still hadn’t managed to find a suitable answer. What was I going to say? That I had a “what the fuck” moment and took my last four Roxies an hour after my normal evening feeding? That when I opened the door to let her in that night I couldn’t see straight? That I was so high my ears were ringing and my face was vibrating?

  “I guess I’m just wiped,” I said, trying to overpower the sudden need to vomit. “But I’m good.”

  Nothing says, “What are you talking about? I’m fine!” quite like charging to the bathroom and vomiting. I had become a veteran puker. It usually happened late at night when no one was around, but not always. Like the time I threw up in Times Square. Or when I vomited in the small trash can in my office in the middle of a weekday. I didn’t know what to do, so I just lit a scented candle and tried to get some work done.

  My assistant came in a few minutes later and busted me. “Dude, did you just vomit in here?” she asked. “It stinks.”

  “I’m not feeling well,” I told her. “It must be something I ate.”

  I said the same thing to Chickpea and suggested that it might be a rough night and was probably a good idea for her to go home. She didn’t argue, of course, which was what made her the ideal “girlfriend” in the first place. We pretended to be a couple when we were together—which was three or four times a week, usually between the hours of midnight and ten a.m. We were both first-rate pretenders and great at ignoring the obvious. I was convinced that if we ran into each other outside of my apartment and either of us was with someone else, we wouldn’t have even said hello. Neither of us would have known how to answer the first question anyone would have asked: How do you guys know each other? Our relationship was the perfect combination of distance and intimacy. (It would end not long after the night she saved my life. She would move back to Oregon about six weeks later.)

  After she left my apartment the night of the OD, I ate. That’s what I did when I was worried I’d overdone it and taken too many pills. I ate. What’s the old saying? Starve a fever, feed an overdose. “Have something to eat,” my mother used to say when I complained about not feeling well. I figured that a layer of food—often more bagels—on top of pills might somehow slow them down or dilute them. Addict logic. I did my fair share of middle-of-the-night carbo-loading.

  The National Magazine Awards are tomorrow.

  That was my first thought—other than taking a second to acknowledge the fact that I was alive—when I woke up the following morning. I immediately started panicking about the awards. The American Society of Magazine Editors was holding its annual awards luncheon the following afternoon at the Waldorf Astoria, and Details had three nominations. That meant three potential opportunities to have to go up onstage in front of the publishing industry and speak. That meant hands to shake. That meant small talk. I’d depleted my opiate stash the night before when I took those final four pills. I was out and knew that I couldn’t see any of my doctors for at least a week, as it would have been too early to get a refill on any of my prescriptions. That meant withdrawal and that meant trouble.

  Dr. Ron wasn’t my first choice. I started the day, as I did most days, on a quest for more drugs. I knew the names of the doctors listed in the pain management section of the phone book the way some men knew the starting lineups of the hometown baseball teams from their youth. Albertson. Chatwal. Cole. Orlov. Steinberg. I knew who was in practice with whom and which doctors worked out of hospitals as opposed to their own offices. I knew receptionists and office managers and the proximity of offices to pharmacies. I knew who was inclined to send me for physical therapy or to push for epidural injections. I knew which doctors would write the big prescriptions and that none, sadly, were going to see me on short notice.

  And I also knew the panic that was starting to churn inside of me. I couldn’t show up at the ASME awards a snotty, sweaty, shivering mess with a clammy handshake and unpredictable bowels—though surely some of the ASME old-timers might.

  Panic eventually gave way to fear. I sat cross-legged on my living-room floor flipping through the phone book and trying to think of who I could call to get more drugs. I needed more and I needed them immediately. Maybe there was a way for me to rob Whitney Chemists on University Place, I thought. Like a scene from Drugstore Cowboy, I imagined setting fire to the front of the store, where they sold travel umbrellas and oversize fragrant soaps and eccentric reading glasses, and when everyone ran to put out the blaze, I could slip behind the counter and swipe a bottle of pills. It would be only a small fire, not big enough to cause damage to the structure of the building or hurt anyone. Just enough to smoke them out—like bees from a hive. I wouldn’t have done it, I don’t think, but I considered it often. I had also contemplated renting the apartment directly above University Chemists right across the street from where I lived. At night, when the pharmacy was closed, I figured I could carefully remove the flooring of my apartment and somehow tunnel, Shawshank style, into the pharmacy below.

  I knew this wasn’t normal, of course. Normal people didn’t fantasize about breaking into pharmacies or drive to Tijuana to buy a thousand Vicodin.
What started as stress about possibly having to miss the National Magazine Awards because I’d be going through withdrawal turned into something far more powerful. I sat chain-smoking on the small Persian rug just in front of the French doors leading to the deck. I was paralyzed with fear.

  Did I actually stop breathing last night? Did I really almost die?

  I’m still not sure why I did what I did next. I suppose I did what any self-respecting Jewish man does during an emergency. I called my mother. I didn’t tell her that I’d stopped breathing while I was sleeping or that a concerned prostitute woke me up—I was sure my mom had a breaking point. But drugs, I figured, she could handle.

  “Mom,” I said, “I think I’ve been taking too many painkillers.”

  Understated, yes, but I didn’t want to give her a heart attack.

  “It’s not that bad,” I told her, “but I wanted to let you know I’m going to see a doctor today for help. Don’t worry.”

  Telling a Jewish mother not to worry is like telling a fish not to swim. It’s all they know.

  “Oh my god. Are you okay?” she asked. “Do you need me to come up?”

  “No, Mom,” I said. “I’ll be okay. I just spoke with a doctor who specializes in this sort of thing and I’m seeing him soon.”

  “What’s his name?” she asked. I was sure this was her way of finding out if he was Jewish, as if that somehow guaranteed better care.

  “Don’t worry about that, Mom,” I said.

  And then a question only my mother would ask: “Is this why you haven’t been calling me back?”

  I’m not sure why I ratted myself out to her. Maybe I wasn’t sure I really wanted to stop, and by telling my mother, I was forcing a decision. I was in such a panic. Maybe I needed to hear that everything would be okay. Maybe this was my opportunity to hit the reset button. Perhaps I really was finally ready to stop. I knew one thing for sure: I definitely had a serious drug problem.

  Dr. Ron’s office wasn’t actually Dr. Ron’s office. It was a loaner—another doctor’s degree framed on the wall and copies of Newsweek and Town & Country on a small table in the waiting room with someone else’s name on the address label.