Simplify, simplify. If I hadn’t already mulched my dog-eared, trade-paper copy of Walden/Civil Disobedience, I could have extended that quotation profoundly, instead of merely adumbrating the idea. Simplify.
By November of 2000, I had a mattress. Stained and remaindered from a two decade-old futon, it laid without linens on the unfinished wood floor, piebald with the overlapping ivory and rust-colored nebulae of both canine and feline micturations. Piss. No sturdy steel or oaken frame, no boxspring, no down or cotton pillows.[1] I had a mattress.
My expensive alarm clock served as turntable for all six of my compact discs.[2] Its weighty trapezoidal bulk was balanced precariously atop a nine compartment mahogany cabinet, itself no bigger than the lower pane of a single-hung sash window. Within its exposed cubbies, I had secreted only the most basic supplies: razor, toothbrush, nail clippers, cotton swabs; six books and a dozen fine-tip, black ink pens; a beaten and bent red notebook, college-ruled, and spiral-bound. A portable, tiny life could be lived out of this not-quite-suitcase.
Folded neatly, nearby, in a knee-high vertical pile was the great majority of my wardrobe: one pair of bluejeans,[3] one pair of black slacks; fourteen pilly black sweat socks, two white cotton vee-necks, and a periwinkle oxford cloth button-down. Adjacent: two Swiss paratrooper boots, mended with electrical tape and encrusted with diner floor filth. Hung on the doorknob was the rest: a red leather jacket, a red-striped power tie.[4]
Outside, on the block, I parked my dented and dirty car, ownership of which was necessitated by my thirty-minute daily commute to work.
This is an exhaustive listing of all my possessions at that time; this was everything I owned. This was my life.
Day after my twentieth birthday[5] I carted clothes, trinkets, tchotchkes, and gewgaws away. I stuffed hollow red bins all over town in an explosion of eleemosynary feeling. I raided my mother’s townhouse basement, retrieved and discarded the old, corrugated-stowed G.I. Joes and Lego blocks I’d once so coveted. I pitched baseball trophies into dumpsters, soaked photographs in water (to ruin them to prying eyes) and dumped them, stuck together and wrecked, into cinch sacks. Soon after this purgation, I moved from the unfinished and infested attic I’d inhabited into the house proper which, ventilated and fully dry-walled, had rested both enigmatically and discomfortingly beneath me, rather like Hades or Sheol, during my tenure as The Man Upstairs. For an extra two bills each month, I became an official roommate and, as if pining for a quantum of my former isolation, previously so despised and assumed asphyxiant, I promptly cloistered myself in that new eight-by-ten cell and embarked upon an existence which bordered on the monastic. Based on my guero’s understanding of Asian monasticism, I had supposed that all monks kept on retainer a master who would whisper to them a personalized koan. Untutored, I had set my own early that August: What comes without effort? November sixth, nearest I could figure, the answer was either “nothing” or “dust.”[6]
So I had simplified, simplified. Like Shiva, I leveled my world to rejuvenate it.[7] Purify it. If a behavior required the effort of affectation or a possession demanded attentive maintenance, then I had deemed it a costly and worthless distraction from insight, enlightenment, and contentment. If, at the most basal level, I found that I didn’t really give a shit about something—if giving a shit was too much dratted and unrewarded work—then I disposed of that something, material or im-. And I reveled in the remaining emptiness. The echoes, loneliness. It seemed bleak and romantic and potentially revelatory.[8] Alternately atrabilious and halcyon, I did not want to be disturbed.
So I boldly shed my dependent tendencies;[9] I opened my door for no one, scheduled no visiting hours for my cell, my bedroom. I worked, I returned home to my chambers. Monday and Tuesday I read The Sirens of Titan and wrote. Wednesday, Thursday: Catcher in the Rye. And some writing. Friday and Saturday: Pirsig’s Zen and the Art. Sundays, I didn’t read and, instead, wrote ’til my digits protruded stiff and swollen; Sunday nights my smallest finger was chapped and ink-smudged from dragging across the page. And Mondays I began anew. The scenario was scored daily with CD one, then two, then three, and on and on. I sang along, sometimes, voice reverberating in my insular little echoplex: eight-by-ten-by-eight, 640 cubic feet to myself, a social vacuum. Four windowless white walls, unadorned by poster or Polaroid. Bare, peeling floors. The smell of old wood, piss soaked into goose down.
Stashed everywhere—under the bed, in the brass and smoked glass overhead fixture, in the toes of folded socks, atop the lip of the doorframe—were a dozen crisp green matchboxes, each one stuffed with a half dozen thumbnail-sized pouches of powder. It was a fishscale[10] summer and subsequent autumn: the quality of all that blow was impeccable and, for a while, just catching sight of that peculiar dark kelly shade of green made my nose run, my guts rumble. I fancied myself an alchemist, my body alembic: every night, inside the cauldron of me, I turned one thing into another. A bottle of copper whiskey into veins full of gold. Crushed powder into courage. Hot cigarette smoke into hope. All of this, I dreamed, leaked out of me, through my pen and onto the page.[11] I was a promising young tyro following the footfalls of Baudelaire, Artaud, Rimbaud,[12] Morrison, Manson, whatever.
And this was my life.[13]
November sixth was an hour old by the thirteenth hour of my coke jag. I’d already emptied every box, written half a book. The matchbox baggies were frequently donated freebies from a dealer who appreciated my earnest efforts to move her product, and I’d gotten them out of the way, so to speak, so that I might have the requisite focus to tackle the aluminum-wrapped eight ball[14] I’d actually purchased with my own hard-earned. And tackle it I had—I was nearly halfway through. By this point in my own nasal Woodstock, the high of a thick line would last about eight minutes. I could ride out another twenty before indulging again. I smoked freely (I finished more than two packs that day), but guarded jealously the delicious, narcotized snot from my runny nose[15]—leaking like a sieve as I labored, head down, over college-ruled red book.
I’d strapped my boots to my feet for fear of floating off to the ceiling. No, that’s not quite right: I’d done it because my legs wanted to dance, to run, but I needed to stay either supine or prone for my art. I’d stripped off my sweaty clothes for fear of spontaneous combustion. During a ropy, full-force piss, I discovered that my eyes looked a lot less like eyes and more like something Henson would have affixed to the felt skin of a Muppet. Exophthalmic and pinprick pupiled.[16] Socks and paratrooper boots, I scribbled assiduously until I discovered—after breaking to cut and gasp a fat rail—that I’d written twenty pages and, subsequently, I had to ask: How long have I been at this?
When I tracked down the time, trapezoidal clock toppled during an aggressive switch of discs an hour or so earlier, I found the date beneath the one a.m. digital stamp and realized I’d misplaced a day. In five hours, I would be required to run a restaurant. I’d be expected, necktied and black-slacked, at the helm of a franchise diner. After thirteen hours of heavy abuse, my body felt (when I stopped to really think about it) absolutely spavined and, even abstaining entirely, there was just no way to sleeplessly recover in time for my shift.
I feared a shitty day, sure, but more than that, I, like every addict, feared discovery. What if someone saw my red-raw membranes, my tender, worm-rubbery palpebra inferior, all that exhausted catarrh? What if someone saw me continually clicking fresh-clipped nails against primary incisors, checking to see that they (the teeth) still hung supported by the pink gums I could no longer feel? What if someone deduced my secret and told?[17] I was the youngest salaried manager in the state. If they took that away from me, I’d be a complete and utter failure.[18] What if I lost my job and everybody knew why?[19]
It should be known that the greatest apocryphal joy of abuse[20] is the secret sybaritic recklessness that lies masked beneath a seemingly normal existence. That the perhaps suicidal and abjectly rebellious hedonism that is perforce the motive power for any narcotics freak can be completely disguised or, at the very least, made mostly irrelevant by a well-lived and socially acceptable life. I loved that somewhere beneath the young man who paid his taxes, and drove a sedan, and worked sixty-to-eighty hours weekly and, for all intents and purposes, was a model citizen, dwelt a bone-deep rebel, an untoward and lively mind uninterested in materialism and which had found reprieve from quotidian dreariness and ennui. Or at least that’s what I considered myself to secretly be. No: that’s what I pretended to secretly consider myself to be; in reality I just hoped to hell someone else would validate my opinion.
I believed I had found a way to escape. I’d won. Think Lester Burnham in American Beauty and his newfound sense of irresponsibility.[21] That’s what the drugs meant to me.[22] And the oppressive reality of clock-punching, my shift’s beginning looming at T-minus four hours and change, threatened that colossally important cluster of illusions, expectations, and misperceptions. Which, I think, makes what came next at least a little more reasonable. One a.m., work at six, my secret life at risk; there was a fire inside me that necessitated immediate quenching. I did the best I could do at the time to solve the problem: I went for my extinguisher.
A cocaine high isn’t like that old commercial. The one with the gunmetal-walled cell and the well-dressed yuppie explaining how he does coke so he can work longer so he can make more money so he can (dramatic pause perhaps indicative of a moment of clarity) do more coke. At the end, he speeds up to a point far past reality and clearly in the country of metaphor, while that old ditty “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows” plays. That’s not what happens at all. Not exactly. Cocaine isn’t going to make you run/win any marathons—good, relatively uncut cocaine isn’t.[23] A double-A battery-sized line of decent blow, sure, might put a little spring in your step, but only to keep up with the celerity of your now simultaneously shattered and hyperfocused mentation. You’ll feel the sense of euphoria that comes part and parcel with narcotics, the “vaporous confidence trip.”[24] And you’ll probably feel a looming potential for panic, but one generally no more intense than working in the cubicle next to the woman whom you saw getting plowed atop the copy desk at last year’s Office Xmas Party. You won’t be pacing a groove into the stainless steel floor, no. But you won’t be going to sleep any time soon. Not without some serious pharmacological assistance. [25]
So: there was a fire inside me and I went for an extinguisher.
Beached sea creature-style, me in my boots, I dragged myself to the grated ductwork in my chamber’s wall which delivered wintertime heat, and I unscrewed the vent. An alchemist’s fire extinguisher, to extend that metaphor, came tucked away inside a red and blue matchbox.[26] Frantic and careless, I tapped the tablets contained within into my clammy palm and dry swallowed, massaging my throat and already mentally raiding the liquor cabinet.[27] I could feel them, the tablets, rending my tender throat: five crayon yellow, uncoated circlets, each resisting peristalsis: diazepam, generic, 5mg a pop. Thinking I’d sated that internal flame, I collapsed back atop my mattress. Slipped out of my shit-kickers and changed my socks. I loaded and pressed play on Pink Floyd’s Animals (soothing, I never made it through that seventeenth minute of “Dogs” in those days) and prepared for Somnus to slink in and solve all of my problems. I set the five-fifteen alarm extra, extra loud.[28]
The problem, however, was evident before “Pigs (Three Different Ones)” faded out. It began as a chest-top deadweight. Fiery. Years prior, a very intoxicated friend had decided that a random handstand atop my thorax would be an hilarious interpolation into an otherwise uninteresting evening of poker and pot and Playstation 1. He weighed two-fifty; the doctor that next afternoon told me that I had a hairline fracture of the sternum; it was months before I could get out of bed without using a lever. November sixth, I felt again like that. Behind my ribs, from some unnamed locus there radiated an inescapable ache: like charliehorsed quadriceps drowned in lemon juice. I flipped to my belly and began a cardio count.
Lub-dup one, lub-dup two, lub-dup three: my heart still beat slightly faster than seconds ticked.
To sleep on my stomach, I have to sleep on my arms and hands. I can’t explain it; I have always been this way. Palms pinioned beneath my pelvis, I began to notice my left shoulder. I could feel the fat ball grinding against its socket. As if I’d just pitched a fielding error-rife, long nine innings. I rolled supine again. Smacked my chops and sneered: whatever was making my gullet rumble and burn made my mouth taste like pennies. I pulled my tongue like a cigarette through tightly clenched fingers, as if I might scrape off the taste.
Lub-dup one, lub-dup two, lub-dup three.
My heart beat faster than disco.
I cleared my throat and breathed deep and slow, in an effort to temper my spasmodically throbbing atria. And then I thought the word that (I think) every cokehead teaches himself to never mutter: heartattack. Because if one says this or even considers it seriously, one cannot then escape its ominousness. In legal cliché: you can’t unring the bell. Once the word is thought, the high is ruined, and the tooter is in for an awful comedown. Heartattack: on the very word, like Bloody Mary or Beetlejuice, that blow-symptomatic looming potential panic considers itself summoned and descends as a fog. My heart beat faster than Indian toms. I’m just freaking myself out, I reasoned, and I turned on the lights and lit up a smoke. It is after all futile, I knew, to expect sleep to come when, lying there, your brain just keeps repeating the phrase, Okay, fall asleep…now!
I stepped into jeans and crept to the living room where I riffled the periodicals piled atop the credenza, and returned to my room with a copy of Rolling Stone. Banality, normalcy, I guessed, would both distract and soothe, and so I read about Marilyn Manson, and Fiona Apple, and A Perfect Circle’s Mer de Noms. I smoked and aggressively ignored[29] the groaning of my shoulder, the compression of my chest. The acidulous copper taste of my tongue.
I did not count my strangled heartbeat.
During my second smoke, I skipped over an article about Johnny Cash “look[ing] death in the eye” and settled for skimming the Top Whatever charts until my vision blackened at the edges, the world suddenly seen through noir film binoculars. I flung the magazine away from me with two-handed force, as if I’d found it riddled with maggots, and whimpered loud as I ground my teeth. I remember thinking this: Who the fuck cares how many records The Wallflowers can sell when human beings can die? And that, Reader, was the moment I officially Lost My Shit.
I gagged and felt the electric dental ache that accompanies a chewing on foil. Gagged again and threw up onto the floor.[30] Gagged a third time and felt the contraction collapse me. The pain was, at first, remarkable, an arctic blue appoggiatura for the titanium white, thought-effacing crackle that followed it. I was the cacophony of a cheap plastic clamshell food carton crushed in meaty fists. My body became a clenched point of near infinite density; somewhere deep inside of me the pain was sharpest where my flexed and compressed meat came into direct contact with my soul: my bones were a stickfigure wrought of razor blades. I remember realizing that I could effortlessly feel the presence of my veins.
My heartbeat was a Brubeck-innovative irregular tempo, and then the heart itself was a flash-frozen flower pounded by a smithy’s sledge. My vision began to further fail and I resisted what I was sure of as true: I was going to die. Tears burned my closed eyes and, when I opened them again, a contact lens floated to my cheek. I twisted my neck and allowed my still-lens-aided eye to fall on that battered red notebook: every ounce of my essence, transmuted to smeared black ink on standard letter-sized, was contained within. The alleged best of me turned, alchemically, to dollar store stationery. I squeezed my eyes like tiny fists and tried to fight the utter ruin of my world: I breathed deep to stay my imminent death and I droned a guttural mantra to prevent real comprehension of the ugly realization that I was a hack, a clichéd lackwit; that I was going to die, and all that I would leave behind was a collection of lousy love poems.[31]
I stayed in bed without crying for help for fear that, if I moved, the world around me would shatter and fall, like stained glass during an earthquake. I’m not sure how long I was there. Until the pain came hot and viscid and yellow instead of icy, severe. Until the irregular throb of my heart became somewhat familiar if still uncomfortable. Until it occurred to me that I was petrified, terrified. Until I realized that not only was I about to die, but that I cared.
I’d spent most of my teenaged life committing a soft suicide with powder, and pills, and LSD driving, and wanton abandon. Within the calendar year, that November sixth, I’d gone so far as having hung myself (and failed, obviously)—the skin on my neck was just starting to match my face in uniformity and color and texture. Who the fuck cares how many records The Wallflowers can sell when human beings can die? I had thought, but not immediately noticed the phrase’s implications. I cared. I was not, as I’d so often sung with Trent Reznor, “Too fucked up to care anymore.” I gave a shit.
That night, I learned that, though I’d spent years building my death, smashing my knuckles against a stubborn self-destruct button, I did not actually want to die. Draped on the doorstep of death, I realized that I cared about being alive.
Animals had long-since ended (I’d restarted it when I grabbed the magazine). Pain was dimmed to a constant scarlet sting and I cried for the first time[32] in nearly a decade. Eyes wet, I crawled out of my cell and down the carpeted hall. Sickness on my breath and in my beard, I clawed at a night owl roommate’s door. “Help me,” I whined. Door opened, he towered above me, a pro wrestling jersey and bad teeth. To his credit, he didn’t ask questions then. He sighed wetly, said, “I’ll get my shoes” and I crawled off to slip into my own.[33]
Roommate kicked hard at my ass as I slunk down the stairs. “Move, you fucking moron. Go. I don’t have all night. I can’t believe I actually got out of bed for this.” He slammed the door of my Oldsmobile hard against the flat of my feet as I worked to fold my seventy-two inches into the backseat. “I’m not going into that hospital,” he explained. And we drove. No radio. Asshole that he was, I felt better already under his aegis.
We parked sixty feet away from the yellow and black framed sliding glass of the emergency room doors; Roommate shut the engine and tossed keys to the dash with an unceremonious clatter against the windshield glass. “If you go in there,” he explained to the rearview, “you know your life is over, right?”
Roommate’s eyes were a cold cornflower blue and his overgrown angular brows lent the rectangular abbreviation of his glare a stern and violent quality that was generally muted by the round smoothness of his winsome face. Those chilly eyes and bushy brows floated disembodied and unflinching as accompaniment for his gravelly nighttime voice. Later, I would realize that I accepted his words so readily, with such gravity, because it was an honest-to-gods movie moment, the sort for which years of media saturation had prepared me, but which I’d grown surer didn’t really exist. “You go in there,” he said, “they will arrest you. They’ll probably come and search the house.” He snapped open a Zippo and struck a flame; he sucked and puffed a Camel Light to life. “Well, I’ve got plenty of weed in our house. And I’m not gonna get tangled with cops just ’cos my dumb fuck roommate went and got himself sick on whatever.”[34]
Shivering, squinting, I lit a cigarette and curled my toes in my boots. I found his floating reflection and spoke to it. “What if there are,” I paused. We had not discussed the specifics of the ordeal. “Aftershocks,” I suggested. “What if I, uh, get sick again and it’s worse this time?” The pain came on every downbeat and it was chartreuse. I was still clammy and trepidatious; more than anything else at that moment, I wanted a guardian, I wanted a protector who would assure my comfort and safety. I wanted to be a child with a father, not a spent addict lying not-so-stretched-out in the vinyl backseat of a sedan. I wanted to be a religious man in sanctuary, in the company of his god, not an apostate trembling at the propinquity of absolute extinction.
“No,” he said and flicked the ash from his cigarette over his shoulder and into my hair. “No fucking way. You’re not getting out and you’re not going to die. If you turn purple, I’ll roll you to the curb and honk the fucking horn, but you’re staying right here, right now. So shut the hell up and stop squirming. I’m going put on some music and take a nap.”
The unflinching sternness of his paternal words did not comfort me, but it silenced me. I smoked and paid attention to my damp, limp, dolorous body. It hurt to breathe deep, to gasp more than a shallow lungful. My fingers ached to even clasp my smoke and so I ground my cigarette out on the floor mat. I craned my neck and checked the time. A ten-hour shift was two hours away. I resigned myself to perhaps making it there to work through it as, hey, a step up on dying alone, a poetaster.
Lying alone on the stiff, incommodious vinyl, I tried not to count my heartbeat. For a while, I counted my breath. I listened to my roommate choke on his soggy snores.[35] Listened to the cool, autumnal, antemeridian echo of slamming doors and squealing tires. For the ninety minutes I spent in that parking lot, I eavesdropped. Every twenty minutes, maybe, another voice evinced an individual: frantic, frustrated, relieved at arrival. Families and friends, screamed and shrieked, one woman sputtered a prayer. Several offered the hypocoristics of kinship to the unconscious and infirm: “You’re okay, Little Man.” I sat up slowly to stare as a skinny, bespectacled best friend goaded his broad-shouldered buddy, the bigger man’s thick, hirsute arms cradling a collapsed girlfriend or sister. “Faster, come on!” begged the nerd. “She’ll be fine, dude,” said his friend, in reply. “They’ll give her charcoal or some shit. Don’t worry, everything’s gonna be alright. You’re not alone, I’ll hang ’til she wakes up.”
Or maybe I dreamt all this.
For each measure of pain that gave way, an equal measure of sadness bloomed in its place. An equal measure of shame: I cared, true, but had to cope with the fact that I had wasted my life on bad poetry, on becoming an abominable cliché. The sky glowed grey. With each heartbeat, pain now came indigo. Duller. Dark, not sharp. Like prodding a recurrent bruise.[36]
[1] This particular futon was also the cause of no less than two Very Awkward Family Moments. One of which was when, in early ’01, I let slip during a kin-plus-girlfriend ham ’n chocolate Easter soiree that I was sleeping at floor-level because the wooden frame of the futon had snapped. When questioned as to how I had applied such torque to the sturdy oaken unit, my then-girlfriend blushed and whimpered and clapped her palms protectively over her breasts and the table was silent for near ninety seconds. Strangely, when in a room with my mother, one might suggest sucking an abortion from a KFC bucket and through a crazy straw whilst perched upon a church pew and receive no reaction. But mention sex and, shit, suddenly everything’s as awkward as chatting about masturbation with a preadolescent Pat Boone. [BACK]
[2] How could one not wonder? Pink Floyd’s Animals and Dark Side of the Moon; Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral and The Fragile; Strange Days, by the Doors; Marilyn Manson’sMechanical Animals. [BACK]
[3] Q.v.: These were, no joke, the holotype of the Ross Geller line. See the essay “Good Jeans.” [BACK]
[4] Did you notice the conspicuous absence in this list? Good for you, Reader. Indeed, I went always commando, Indian, true Scotsman, in those days. To Chileans, yo andeo a lo gringo. I didn’t even own an emergency pair of drawers—mostly because I couldn’t fathom what emergency would require I don them. And then one day I split my pants. Suddenly, I understood. [BACK]
[5] See the essay “Pink Turtleneck About Which Nobody Asks Questions.” [BACK]
[6] An individual to whom I told this tale once suggested that this could also accurately be answered with the word “breath.” This is just proof that even Zen, in the hands of a depressive, becomes nothing more than an amplifier of malaise. I would never have considered such a silly, insipid, life-affirming anti-profundity as “breath.” [BACK]
[7] As in FN6, here’s another instance of Garden Variety Depressive’s Myopia: it’s all well and good to destroy in order to create, but your good old-fashioned Nihilist tends to forget that, after one’s life and existence are completely empty (destroyed), one needs to build something other, something new (create!), lest one lose one’s fucking mind. If nothing new is built then not committing suicide becomes an even more grandiose and spectacular failure—either go hard or go home, nihilist. [BACK]
[8] Really—surprise—I was just profoundly depressed. [BACK]
[9] If the sarcasm here is less than clear, it’s because I (the writer) am mocking me (the character in the memory/essay). I, of course, did not divest myself of psychological dependence on others. I may be an Olympic-class misanthrope but, as a being evolved from social apes, I do still have interpersonal needs. I was a naïve moron to think that this was a problem which I could “solve.” [BACK]
[10] The blow in town that year was called fishscale, a term I didn’t know was common parlance ’til May of ’aught-six, when Wu-Tang alumnus Ghostface Killah dropped a so-titled album. Fishscale cocaine is relatively pure (compared to other shit you find streetside) and had a drip (the post-nasal runoff that follows a pull or two of powder) that tasted a lot like chewed aspirin and a mouthful of whiskey sour. That may sound disgusting, but I swear I would have eaten it as soup. Perhaps most cokeheads won’t admit it, but they feel the same way. [BACK]
[11] It didn’t. Poetry collection #1: The Simulacrum (it was about drugs and poetry). Poetry collection #2: Prototype Neophyte (this one was different: it was about drugs and depression). Yikes. [BACK]
[12] Which, despite my reasonable knowledge of French, I persisted in pronouncing as “Rim-bawd.” This, I’m sure, lent an especially unsavory air to my affected poet’s arrogance and insight. Of course, that’s assuming that anyone knew what and who the hell I was talking about, or that anyone was ever paying me any attention at all. They didn’t and weren’t, respectively (my associate-employee contemporaries and roommates were more the XTina set and knew nothing of poetry beyond greeting cards), so I suppose, really, this footnote is really about me wanting to slap the crap out of twenty-year-old me. The wiry little douche. [BACK]
[13] In person, I don’t discuss this time of my life often. In fact, I tend to avoid thinking about it as well. It was, in a word, unpleasant. Writing about it and (more than a year later, at the time of this footnote) even cursorily editing previously penned paragraphs calls back the tremulant ennui of those days and makes me wonder how it is that I never succeeded, intentionally or accidentally, on killing myself (more on this later). I was bloody miserable. On a Dickensian scale. [BACK]
[14] This is, for the uninitiated, an eighth of an ounce (3.5g) of cocaine. Roughly translated to a teetotaler’s unit of measure, it is a Shitload of Blow for One Little Guy. According to other dabblers I later questioned, this amount of cocaine should have lasted me, alone, two to three days, unless I was on a Hunter Thompson-style binge Whoops. [BACK]
[15] As I’ve stated elsewhere, this “drip” is the secret and slightly appalling joy of most tooters. It wasn’t just me. And before you, Reader, start judging, go and blow a few lines. It’s like foie gras: the drip is alarming and objectionable until the moment it hits your palate and you forget all about anything extraneous like force-feeding or the fact that you’re gleefully swallowing long Scotch tape-like ribbons of your own phlegm. Get thee to a dealer! [BACK]
[16] For those who might cavil: Requiem for a Dream’s famous cooking-shooting-dilating montage got it all wrong and did so on purpose. The pupils constrict with opiates; Aronofsky just switched it around because he felt dilation looked cooler and, he figured, most folks wouldn’t know. He was right on both counts. [BACK]
[17] No one needed much deductive skill. I’d have been less obvious most days if I ran the joint with a tightly coiled dollar bill jammed up my nose. [BACK]
[18] I knew, but tried to ignore, that being a franchise diner’s salaried manager already made one a complete (but not complete and utter) failure. If you asked me, I was doing something menial while I waited to be discovered, whatever the devil that meant. [BACK]
[19] It wasn’t until years later that I realized losing this job might have been the best of all possible things that could have happened to me. When a diner later fired me, it set into motion the course of events that allowed me to at least slightly, if not redeem, then reclaim myself. [BACK]
[20] The greatest overt (and oft-overlooked) joy of abuse is that drugs make you feel good. They’re fun (for a while). It staggers me the number of people who seem to have never really comprehended that. [BACK]
[21] The phrase “newfound sense of irresponsibility” is absolutely pinched from season seven of The Simpsons, episode “Mother Simpson.” It’s lovely, that phrase, I think. [BACK]
[22] And, of course, they made me feel good. I suppose Prozac or Xanax would have been more ideal, but you try acquiring those without medical insurance. The runaround alone is prohibitive, much less the cost. Quoth J. Spaceman from pop ensemble Spiritualized: “I’ll just as likely find inner peace from buying the stuff up off the street.” I was a self-medicating depressive. The morose truth is that, when high, I didn’t constantly want to die because life felt so, well, bad: that is what the drugs really meant to me. [BACK]
[23] Lousy coke, from disreputable dealers, that has been cut with an amphetamine instead of something inert (like baby formula or, shudder, Ex-Lax) actually might, on the other hand, do this. And then your heart would explode. [BACK]
[24] Danielewski, Mark Z. House of Leaves. New York: Pantheon Books, 2000. [BACK]
[25] Oddly, I can say that some of the best sleep I’ve ever had came shortly after ingesting Zeusian amounts of either ephedrine (bronchodilator and amphetamine) or fen-phen (speed strong enough that, when prescribed as a diet pill, it was causing 400lb. women to drop like flies). I slept blissfully, possibly because I was barely asleep and instead actually in a cat-like state of readiness where I could appreciate semi-consciousness. The joy of sleep is, generally, wasted on the unconscious. That’s sad. [BACK]
[26] The philluministic thread here was entirely a matter of convenience. Matchboxes just made for good stash kits. No symbolism. [BACK]
[27] I quickly recalled that all we had left was Everclear (190 proof grain alcohol), which was arguably only present upon our shelves for shock value/novelty. No one drank it, not ever, after we’d discovered that neither Kool-Aid nor industrial quantities of generic Dr. Pepper would mask its awful flavor. Thus, that evening I went without which, when one considers how the story ends, is probably a damned good thing. [BACK]
[28] It should be stated here that this, actually, was not too far off from my normal Day Off Ritual. The familiarity of the “pill chases blow” scenario was probably what allowed me that initial assumption of safety. What I would usually do was this: cocaine, cocaine, cocaine, cocaine and then, three hours before bedtime, I’d quit. Two hours after my last toot, I’d drop a Valium (or two, if I felt mentally spasmodic or physically jittery) and, within that hour next, I’d feel dreamy and calm all over again. I’d listen to “Dogs” and count my heartbeats until I segued into sleep. Bedtime was a non-issue. November sixth, however, I didn’t have time to pace or space anything and I had to break into my emergency stash of diazepam to find so many milligrams. [BACK]
[29] Which is another way of saying “failed to ignore.” One can only “aggressively ignore” an elephant in the room. It works the same way as not thinking of a dog when someone says, “Whatever you do, don’t think of a dog.” [BACK]
[30] It had been, by this point, only almost an hour since I’d dropped those diazepam and, oddly, they were plainly not present in the briny, liquid mess of my spew. [BACK]
[31] And, oh, there was absolutely one called “Lady in White” which was a (I thought at the time) clever personification of cocaine. And I proudly let people read that shit. How embarrassing. I learned the phrase “reinventing the wheel” sometime in 2003 and, yes, it comes in handy a lot whilst describing my formative years. When coping with the events of my formative years, however, it is best to simply lie, and tell people I was born full-grown, at twenty-three. [BACK]
[32] For the first time unprompted by a movie, live music, or a book—an odd condition with which I was long afflicted. I couldn’t cry for real life. But in the face of an entertainment, well, I was far enough away from myself to let go. [BACK]
[33] In yet another stunningly bold fashion choice, I left the house that evening in unlaced combat boots, unbuttoned jeans, a red leather jacket and no shirt. And I’m not kidding about the sick in my goatee. Thankfully, this was before cell phone cameras became inexpensive and plentiful. [BACK]
[34] There are several germane things I might say at this juncture. Yes, his facts were all wrong—no cops were going to come and search our pad just because I got a bad dose. I didn’t know that then, though. The amount of weed he smoked made him paranoid and, I suppose, it’s reasonable and foreseeable that one user to be wary of official entanglements even in the aid of another. Secondly, I doappreciate both my disturbing suggestibility and the cupidity with which I will immediately cleave to anyone even remotely resembling a paternal figure. In some cases less grave and more ridiculous than this one, I’ve actually sort of emotionally thrown my chips in with some dude who was younger than I. Think Zach Braff’s character on Scrubs in the third-season episode “My Catalyst.” I’ve got some daddy issues, yeah. [BACK]
Finally, I think that my roommates—with whom I never once spoke of my habit—thought I was using heroin. In some odd way, I took this as a compliment. It takes a special kind of miserable fuck to shoot up and, no matter how disenchanted with life I’ve ever been, I’ve always been a little too self-respectful to spike my veins. But that they assumed the worst of me flattered me in a perhaps unusual way: they did recognize my unhappiness and that made me happy (sort of) because “lives of quiet desperation” inherently blow because they’re so goddamn quiet and lonely. Pain abates slightly with validation. Of course, that they so recognized this basal malaise and never once offered any sort of camaraderie to ameliorate it is the opposite of flattery. I think, back then, that this set of roommates were just jerks and I was just an improvident dunderpate, seduced by the more romantic aspects of drug life, and settling for whatever attention I could get.
[35] This kid had, asleep, a wet rasp which recalled Harry Caray and sort of made me want to both puke and slap him. [BACK]
[36] The aftermath of the ordeal is as follows: I, of course, quit the cocaine. I abandoned my every vice, save booze, for five full years after that day (until, in ’aught-five, my ground-down knees introduced me to a little after-dinner treat called Vicodin—which definitely serves a medicinal purpose for me, but a sweet ancillary benefit is that it makes me feel like I’m being hugged). I went to work. I came home and slept. The next day, I got my shift covered and went to a free clinic (before cutbacks required they all be closed) and the doctor told me that I had quite probably suffered a heartattack, despite my age (twenty years). He told me that an EKG was out of my price range and there was no way to be sure, but that another one would very probably kill or cripple me. There are some things to be said about both the diagnosis and prognosis.
I later learned that a simple blood test can determine whether or not one has suffered a heartattack and thus this doctor was very likely equivocating to scare me shitless (it worked and I’m grateful). And within the next two years, I realized that what had really transpired that November sixth was probably a chain reaction fueled by pharmacological contraindication and ignorance. Diazepam can, in fact, produce tachycardia or arrhythmia and this side-effect (noticed by my addled psyche) probably triggered a massive anxiety attack—a phenomenon to which I’d never realized my vulnerability because I had no idea such things were real medical events and not just postmodern whininess. Probably, I wasn’t in danger of dying that night. But, if I had to speculate, I’d guess that what I experienced that night is a lot like what dying feels like. [BACK]
