Lullabies for Suffering

by Caroline Kepnes et al.

  We had a team-building day. They shoved us into three old school buses with busted ACs and drove us to a hotel. During a panel on empathy, I asked Juan why he was smiling since what we were listening to was the most boring shit ever. He looked around, put his hand in his front shirt pocket, and gave me a white, round pill. I swallowed it dry. Half an hour later the stuff they were telling us about made me smile just as wide. I was hooked. If weed was good, Oxycontin was great. On Oxy, not giving a shit became much easier. The world was softer, my stress seemed to have relaxed. Nothing mattered. I felt…strong and free.

  The bad thing was that I soon needed more. I needed something stronger to make the world softer. That’s when heroin came in like a heroine.

  Like most things in life, it happened by accident. A great childhood friend caught me popping an Oxy during a small party at his house and he introduced me to heroin. He took me up to his room and pulled out a little box where he had all his stuff. I watched him fix up, like he was a damn chemist and phlebotomist, cooking the junk, and then drawing some blood from his vein, the darkness spiraling into the syringe like thick, slow-moving smoke, and then pushing in the plunger. It was mesmerizing, A beautiful ritual. My turn was next.

  “You’ll never forget me, my man,” he said. “You’ll never forget the first person who helped you shoot up. This shit will change your life.” He was right. When I think of the darkness born of that moment, I remember his face and his eyes buried under that deep brow. I only needed help shooting up once. I learned quickly how to do it on my own. I went to college, remember, I’m educated.

  I’d like to say heroin was like laying down in a field of flowers while the sun’s rays caress my face, but that’s not it. I’d like to say it’s like scratching a deep itch, but that’s not it either. I’d like to say it’s like summer vacations or Saturday mornings, but they all fall short.

  Have you ever felt the hand of God inside you, as if he reached his palm into your chest, caressed your heart, and nothing but his good grace and beauty pumped through your veins? Well, that, my dearest Angelica, is what heroin feels like.

  After discovering heroin, everything else blurred together. Heroin made me float through life on a cloud of comfort. On good days, going to work high meant reading through files while the radio played smooth jazz. On bad days, it was a few hours of suffering through sweat and cramps and cravings and looking at the clock every two minutes while thinking about getting a fix.

  People often talk about drug addicts in derogatory ways and fail to realize that there are many addicts out there who, like me, learn to be functional and work right alongside the rest of the living like some secret breed. Junkies cut your hair and mow your lawn. Junkies go to school with you and cheer from the sidelines during your kid’s little league game. Junkies teach your kids at school and serve you at your favorite restaurant. If you live in an expensive neighborhood, chances are your neighbor is popping pills and swallowing them with wine. Yeah, addiction is everywhere. The world is rough, so we become addicted to social media. We become hooked on booze or porn. We get addicted to money and sex and lying. We become addicted to a million things that help us escape reality. I became addicted to heroin because it was an airplane to paradise. It was poison, but it felt like medicine, a magic elixir that unveiled the splendors and beauty of life.

  Somehow, I pulled it off. Yes, I did. In fact, my entire life became better while I was using heroin. I didn’t get to enjoy every second of it and some of what happened is a hazy memory, but the end result is the same: I met an incredible woman named Crystal and we started dating. We liked each other. We loved horror movies and stand-up comedy. We fell in love and got married. We moved into a bigger house in Carolina. Low income housing, but relatively clean. We had a beautiful baby daughter and we named her Angelica because she was an angel and that is a perfect name for a little angel with eyelashes so damn long they belong in a cartoon.

  Yes, that’s you. I still think you are an angel.

  Anyway, I was there for all of those events, but I was also absent. Life as a junkie is what happens between fixes. You can be doing something, but you’re never fully there. If you’re high, it’s like you’re hovering above the moment at all times. If you’re not high, you’re there but a part of you is thinking about getting a fix. Being an addict is living in the interstitial space between fixes, in the desperate moments between getting what you crave and worrying about how obvious it is to others that you need it. The day you were born? I got high in the parking lot. Holding you sent electricity down my arms and filled my chest with something akin to warm cotton candy. I know that was love, but it was love on heroin, and as I held you, I was worried about getting high again. And that’s the worst thing about heroin: it gives and it takes away. It makes things simultaneously brighter and darker. It beautifies while corrupting. It amplifies things as it infects them. It makes your life more bearable as it kills you.

  Fast-forward five years. I was still at the insurance company, still unhappy, and still stressed. I still had loans to pay and now I also had a mortgage, a car, a phone, car insurance, all the expenses that come with having a baby…you get the idea. I also had my junk habit. That’s not easy on the wallet.

  I was broke and things were only getting worse. Just like love or friendship, heroin’s ability to take your reality and make fucking balloon animals out of it erodes over time, so you do more and it costs more. And that cycle never ends.

  My second foray into crime was a couple of months after you were born. The day you were born was the happiest day of my life, but it also scared the shit out of me. It’s easy to save enough money to keep your junk habit when you can squirrel money away here and there and don’t have any major expenses. That changes when you have to buy diapers and formula almost daily, your spouse is at home recuperating and emptying the fucking fridge every night, and you have a small tower of medical bills on the table that look like a stack of white pancakes. In order to give myself some breathing room, I decided to try out something I’d read about in an article a few months earlier.

  On a Tuesday night I left the house at around 11:20 pm. I had to get diapers again. This time, however, I was going to take a little detour.

  Instead of going to the usual Walgreens, I drove sixteen more blocks and parked in the side parking lot of a small credit union. Believe it or not, it’s a place most folks don’t visit at night. Rumor has it a young boy riding his bike was run over by a lady leaving the bank and students who live in the apartment complexes nearby claim they often see the kid, whose arms are missing, wandering the parking lot. Los Desmembrados, they called it, wandering spirits killed in car accidents who are missing their limbs. Our version of La Llorona, which haunts lonely roads. Just one of many legends that come from this island, like the angry spirits of Tainos murdered by Spaniards in the rivers of Yabucoa, or the strange creatures that inhabit the murky waters of the inlet of Guanica. The list goes on and on. If you haven’t seen these types of strange things on these streets, you haven’t lived here long enough. Maybe they do see a ghost, but when addicts need money, these things don’t matter.

  The parking lot is pretty big, surrounded by trees and the ATM was at the back of the building, so I felt somewhat comfortable. I pulled out my phone and pretended to text for a while until a car pulled up. A man with a black trucker hat and a black shirt stretched tight around a prodigious gut stepped out. He would have been hard to handle. I kept playing with my phone. Midnight was quickly approaching and I was thinking about heading back home when a second car pulled into the parking lot. This time the driver was a woman. She looked like she was in a rush. She wore a blue pencil skirt, a white shirt and her heels cracked against the asphalt. She made it to the ATM and went through the motions. My brain started showing me images of a nice bundle of cash and converting it to heroin. The woman was in a hurry and wasn’t paying attention. I was thankful for that but thanking God at that time struck me as fucking blasphemy. I was going to he
ll already, but there was no need to make things worse.

  I knew about ATM cameras and I wasn’t going to risk it. I pulled a hat down tight over my eyes and stepped out of the car, casually strolling toward the woman’s car. She noticed me, but it was too late.

  “Don’t make a scene or I’ll shoot you.”

  My voice was surprisingly calm. I was in control. Desperation changes people, and never into something better. I was no different. I was a calm junkie pretending to be okay. Her eyes betrayed nothing, but her body went as rigid as a board. I touched the side of my body slowly, hoping she would think I had a gun.

  “Say hi to me like you know me and then put the money in the front seat of your car. I swear I’m not gonna hurt you.”

  She wasn’t convinced. Her eyes darted around the parking lot. I needed to bring her back to me and slash any dumb ideas that could be popping into her head.

  “Hey, look at me. Walk this way. Put the money in the car. Now.”

  She didn’t move. I thought about the ATM camera. I thought about someone else coming into the parking lot. I thought about rotting in jail like a fucking idiot while my wife and baby daughter sat at home, alone and in need of food or diapers or a hug.

  I bolted.

  On my way home I prayed. I prayed that she hadn’t seen and memorized my license plate. I prayed that no red and blue lights would blossom in my rearview mirror. I prayed that money would just fall out of the sky so I wouldn’t be tempted to do anything that stupid and dangerous ever again. I prayed for a better job or some new opportunity. Then I listened to the silence as I drove and thought about how the only constant thing when it comes to God is his unresponsiveness.

  My hands were shaking when I pulled into the garage. I walked into the house and was about to throw my keys on the table when I remembered the diapers and formula. The drive back to Walgreens was the longest I’d ever done.

  Sadly, I knew I wasn’t finished. My brain kept thinking about ways to make easy money. I thought about stealing and kidnapping. I planned out holding up a convenience store. I thought about getting a mask and trying the ATM thing again. I thought about hanging out in the parking lot outside the mall and sticking up the last stragglers making their way out of the movie theater. I thought about going through the purses women left unattended at work. All of it struck me as too risky for the small reward I’d get. Nothing was worth not seeing you again. Nothing.

  Then the perfect opportunity presented itself.

  To help keep myself functional during work hours, I relied on clonazepam. I popped them throughout the day. They took the edge off everything and submerged the world in a fuzzy warmth that made being at work without a fix bearable. The only downside was more trips to meet my dealer.

  We met at the parking lot of an old panaderia every Thursday at 5:45pm. When I got there, he was sitting in his car, screaming into his phone. When he saw me, he yelled once more and hung up. He rolled down his window.

  “How are you, Adam?” he asked.

  “I’m doing okay, Marco,” I replied. “All good with you?”

  “Yeah, I’m good.”

  “You sure? You seemed agitated on the phone.”

  Asking your dealer questions like this is never a good idea, but junkies aren’t the smartest people.

  “Yeah…this shit you’re using to stay mellow when you’re feeling sick? This shit is mostly for bougie white folks in Condado and students who are too afraid to take something stronger. It’s big business. I have a dude who helps me make deliveries. You know, just the pills. Anyway, the problem is he looks like a fucking thug. He should be playing a bad guy in the movies instead of trying to be one in real life. He’s always getting pulled over because of the window tints on his car and they don’t let him into buildings that require an access code because people get scared. He just had to skip another delivery. He was having a cigarette next to his car when some crazy motherfucker popped out of the house with a .45 screaming about neighborhood safety and keeping the place clean. He just called to say that he’s waiting for me now.”

  “Waiting for you here?”

  Marco looked at me and frowned.

  “Why the fuck are you asking all these questions, man? You want your horse or not?”

  “Yes, I do. And I’m asking because I can help you,” I said.

  “Help me? How da fuck can you help me?”

  “Look at me,” I said, stepping back and doing a turn. “I’m clean. No facial hair. No tattoos. I dress like I could fucking do your taxes. My car is a piece of shit with regular windows. I don’t stand out.”

  Everything I said to Marco was something I had already thought about. A lot. Keeping up appearances is crucial when you have fucked up arms and thighs and feet and spend an inordinate amount of time looking for a vein and then plunging a needle full of wavering mirages into your flesh. Once you start using regularly, veins disappear, harden, track marks show up easily. I wear long sleeved shirts for work and sweat my way through.

  “Yeah, so?”

  “So I can make any drop you need. The way I look means no one will pay as much attention to me as they do to your current delivery man. He looks like a criminal. I look like a fucking pizza delivery guy.”

  I won’t recount the rest of that conversation. I’m short on time to write, this hotel room is shrinking, the evil I’ve uncovered is closing in, and there is so much to say. The point is this, and you already probably saw it coming, Angelica: I started doing deliveries for Marco. I would do them right after work, during lunch, or whenever I had to go get formula at the grocery store or diapers in the afternoon. It was easy. I got paid in junk. There was more money in the house. Mom got flowers. You got toys. Bills got paid. I was happy. Things were good for a couple months.

  Then things went bad and got really fucking dark.

  I met Marco at the usual parking lot on a Thursday like any other. He handed me a few packages and then asked me if I was willing to do him another favor. He said he’d keep me high for a month. I should have asked what it was all about. I should have realized that when a drug dealer asks you for a favor your response should always be no. I should have walked away from the whole thing and continued to save my pennies and pay for my junk like any regular God-fearing addict. But I did none of that. The idea of free heroin was too powerful. It was a bright light inside my brain that blocked out all rational thought. Free horse was the only thing I could think of. I immediately said yes.

  The gig was relatively easy. All I had to do was accompany one of Marco’s men to a transaction, bring a shotgun along, and try to look like a bad motherfucker and someone who would pull the trigger at the least provocation. I was neither. He knew it and I knew it. However, I was a desperate junkie, and that means I was willing. That was something we both knew. I wasn’t what he wanted, but I could offer what he needed. That, Angelica, is life in a nutshell: people looking for something they want and mostly having to settle for some knockoff, lesser version.

  The night it went down, I told your mom I was going to meet my boss at a café to go over some special files he wanted me to study in detail. I sweetened the lie by telling her he was going to pay me a little bonus for that work. It would be easy to fake because I would be saving money all month instead of buying junk. I thought it was a brilliant idea. After so much darkness, the clouds had parted and a little ray of sunshine was shining down on my head. It felt good.

  You know how dangerous things always seem to happen in slow motion in movies? That’s not how they go down in real life. In real life shit goes south quickly.

  I met Marco’s man at the same spot I always met his boss. He was waiting in a black Chrysler 300 with windows so dark they looked like black mirrors. The car sat on thick tires wrapped around matte black rims. When he saw me approaching, he lowered the window and told me to get inside. The smell of weed wafted out as soon as I opened the door. I climbed inside and shut the door carefully. The man was wearing a beanie and black jacket. It was hot
as hell outside. He looked as out of place as a guy in a bathing suit walking around Anchorage in January.

  The man turned to me and said his name was Ronny and then explained what I was supposed to do.

  “Play it cool. Your job is to just look like you don’t take shit from people, you copy me?”

  I was wearing my oldest jeans, a pair of black sneakers, and an old black T-shirt. That was my version of a badass.

  “I’m gonna give you a shotgun as soon as we get there,” said Ronny. “You know how to use it?”

  “Not really.”

  “Fuck.”

  He looked at me and I could tell he was thinking about whether I’d be useful or not. Apparently, I was the only option, so he continued.

  “It’s easy. You have four cartridges in there. Before you walk in, make sure the safety is off. If you can see a little red dot at the top, that means it’s off. You can’t shoot the thing with the safety on, so remember that. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  “Okay, good. You seen fuckers pump a shotgun in movies, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Cool. You’re gonna do that. Pull back hard and then pull forward. You’ll hear a clacking sound each time. Clack-clack. That means there’s a live round where it needs to be. If you have to fire, aim in the general direction of whatever or whoever you wanna fuck up and pull the trigger. It’s pretty hard to miss with a damn shotgun. After shooting you can pump again and again if you need to. Three more times. I didn’t bring any more ammo. If you have to shoot that thing four times for some reason and still need more…well, you’re fucked.”