Acrobaddict (32 page)

A few weeks of abstinence had gone by and I was free from the restraints of heroin. I physically felt better; no more runny nose and achy bones. Using made me feel as if I had a constant cold or flu. Even though I had not used heroin in a while, I was not completely opiate-free. I endured a botched root canal and was experiencing extreme pain, which gave me a new hobby: dentists. I would find different dentists, show them my tooth, lie about the pain, and then receive medication. Afterward, I would make an appointment to fix the problem and never show up, traveling to another dentist to repeat the cycle. I was getting Vicodin, Percocet, Roxicet, Endocet, and Tylenol with codeine, which was my least favorite. I would take about fifteen to twenty pills and go to work, trying to catch the same feeling I got from heroin.

Vic was my only remaining drug ally; she would smoke pot with me and talk about how we could find a new heroin connection now that Asten had moved away. We thought maybe it was possible to randomly ask people on the subway who were obviously nodding out. Or we could go to a club and ask around, but fear kept us from going through with any of those scenarios. I told her about Asten’s old roommate, the odd woman who answered the phone whenever
I called him to buy drugs. She was the secretary for the damned. Maybe it was possible to call her to see if she knew someone.

Vic and I figured we would at least try to find someone else, but we still didn’t have a solid plan. Should we just call this woman we didn’t know and ask if she knew someone who could get us heroin? Did people do those sorts of things? Vic begged me to call the woman, but I couldn’t because I was terrified. What was I going to say? “Um, hello . . . I don’t know if you remember me, but I am Asten’s friend. Um, he used to get me heroin; can you get me some?” But that is exactly what I did, though when I said the word “heroin” she quickly said “coffee,” letting me know her code word to use on the phone. Yes, it was coffee I wanted and coffee I was after. She sounded inebriated, with a hoarse voice, as if she had begun smoking in utero. She said I would have to buy her a bag for getting me one. I didn’t have a problem with that, and we made plans to meet in Hell’s Kitchen.

The joy of finding a new dealer after weeks of forced abstinence felt like Christmas. Vicky and I stumbled over each other to catch a cab and told the driver to go to the Coffee Pot at Forty-ninth and Ninth. Upon our arrival I scanned the tables, going over each person, wondering which one held the golden key to my nirvana. I spotted a woman staring down at the floor as if she were going to start a fight with the tile. She was chubby and disheveled, and had a bandana wrapped around her head. She was dressed in oversized men’s clothing, with large eyes, greenish skin, and beads of sweat dripping from her forehead. Her hand was tightly wrapped around a black cane that had taken its own beating. Our eyes met and I prayed to God it wasn’t her, but of course it was, and she waved to me and said loudly, disturbing the quiet environment, “Hey you, Chico, over here!”

Oh no, oh God, it
is
her
, I thought as I smiled and happily waved back. I anxiously walked over to the table and sat down, acting like we were longtime friends. The heroin had soullessly united us. It was critical to establish a friendship with this woman because she would be replacing Asten’s role in my life, and I couldn’t afford to lose that connection.

Vicky joined us at the table and we talked about random things. It was around two o’clock in the afternoon and the woman, named Kimi, was blind, stinking drunk. The vodka burned off her breath like a chemical fire, making my eyes water. She circled the table while the sweat continued to trail down her face, despite her sopping it up with a dirty, tattered, plaid handkerchief. She was making me nauseous, and I wanted to hose her down. The awkward moment came when I had to exchange the money for drugs, but it was a smooth transaction because we were both professionals and well educated in the field. I told Kimi I’d be right back and left Vicky alone with the insane woman. I got high in the bathroom, and it tasted as good as I’d remembered.

When I came back to the table, the effects had begun to hit me, and all that I had thought was hideous about Kimi changed. In my high, her sweat didn’t seem gross, and what I saw before me was a kindhearted woman with a cane. In my euphoria, her wide eyes sparkled and everything she said was funny. Maybe I had misunderstood her earlier. Vicky and I said our good-byes, took a cab back to the Upper East Side, and broke the news to Darren about our new contact, bringing back an extra bag to soften the blow. Though the bond between Darren and me had been sealed through drugs, over time those drugs would become the poison that destroyed our longtime friendship.

I was the only one allowed to go over to Kimi’s apartment to pick up the heroin. Dealing with her was difficult because she was a complete disaster. Even though I would speak with her on the phone an hour before I was due to arrive, she would answer the door in an alcohol-induced blackout and not be able to remember why I was there. In her drunken paranoia, she would hide the heroin somewhere in her destroyed apartment, and we would have to dig through trash to find it. When you’re dope sick, the urgency to use heroin is extreme. The fact that the heroin was lost in her apartment and she couldn’t find it was like being in that cartoon of a cat surrounded by hundreds of cans of tuna without a can opener.

Kimi lived in a one-bedroom apartment hidden beneath the clothes of her girlfriend Eva, a petite, abused Greek woman who was
experimenting with her sexuality at the ripe age of forty. She had had a terrible past with crack and switched to heroin when she moved in with Kimi. Their relationship was beyond dysfunctional and always seemed to be in some sort of a crazy, codependent crisis. It was obvious to me that Eva had been abused many times in the past, and the glue that held their relationship together was the sticky sap from the opium flower. They were always fighting, but Eva never argued with Kimi; instead she responded as if she were a baby, complete with childlike tone, weeping before her mother. Kimi had infantilized this woman into a little, abused girl and played the roles of both the abuser and the manly protector. Kimi was the threat and the hero. I don’t know what kind of romance they had, but I believed Eva was not a lesbian. Rather, she was a diehard drug addict who would become whatever anyone needed—something I related to. This allowed her to get close to the source that kept her alive, but man, what a price to pay! Some say people who marry for money earn it, and I guess it’s the same for people who marry for heroin, because to be in the same room with Kimi was like waltzing with a poltergeist.

Kimi had her own terrible past, and on the shelf of her dusty apartment was a copy of Sylvia Plath’s
The Bell Jar
, next to a copy of
Alcoholics Anonymous
(also known as the Big Book). The familiarity of that book stuck out like the hand of God reaching through the darkness and chaos of the room; however, we all ignored it. Back in the 1980s, when Kimi worked, she got into a bad car accident, resulting in the now-infamous cane that she never walked without. She had seen many doctors since then and had perplexed them all; they could find no reason for her back pain.

If I had been dying from a rare disease and the cure was to hang out in that apartment, I wouldn’t have been able to do it; but I endured that kind of madness for my heroin. The more I stayed, the less frightening Kimi and Eva’s place seemed. Was I becoming more like the apartment, or was the apartment becoming more like me? I needed to get high in their bathroom just to be able to make small talk with the two of them.

One day I was in Kimi’s room and a huge box of syringes fell out from behind the wooden doors of her closet, which were cracked open. It freaked me out because I assumed that she sniffed the drug like I did. I asked Kimi how often she used heroin and she said, “Only on occasion,” because she was a lifer on methadone. The amount of methadone she needed was too high for the heroin’s effects to break through, but if she skipped a day or two of methadone, she could feel it. Every day she hobbled from her cave with her cane, scuttling over from Eleventh to Tenth Avenue to the methadone clinic next to Duane Reade. If I couldn’t find Kimi at her apartment, I would walk up Tenth Avenue and see her hanging out with her clan of methadone addicts, waiting in line. They all had canes of their own, and for a moment, when they were all gathered together, it looked like the dead had crawled out of their graves to form a line in front of the drugstore. Kimi would never get off methadone, and in a sad way her life enslaved her to the red liquid and confined her to the island of Manhattan. That was why I had to be careful whenever I detoxed myself.
Never take too much methadone over a long period of time
, I warned myself, or I would end up with my own cane in that same line. I wondered who used those needles up in her closet, and then the thought darted into my mind,
How much worse could it be? I’ve already died twice
.

I had been recently kicked out of my group meetings at the halfway house because I kept relapsing; they required at least thirty days of abstinence, and I couldn’t even maintain a full week without using. I continued to see my counselor Derrick and enjoyed talking to him. He saw past my addiction and told me if I could manage to stay in recovery, my life would blossom. He believed that somewhere inside me lived a good guy who had the potential to do something positive with his life. I didn’t believe him, but I wanted to. He said things that shot straight into my heart. “Joe, if you are serious about recovery and you truly don’t want to use, you will have to leave your boyfriend because the relationship has become codependent.”
Leave Nick? Was he crazy? After all we had been through together—homelessness, rehabs, mental institutions—how could I leave him? I loved him,
and couldn’t imagine a life without him
. Derrick continued, “Neither of you will get into recovery if you stay together. Your addiction ties you together, and you have been through so much that a bond has been created through the trauma of your lives.” That made sense to me, but the thought of leaving Nick was unbearable.

Derrick was constantly bringing up the past and my gymnastics glory days when I trained at the camp at the Olympic Training Center. “Don’t you know how much you accomplished at such a young age? You know that potential still lives within you.” I didn’t want to talk about gymnastics again, and the memories of those times made me want to bust open a vein right there in his small therapy cubicle. Even though I secretly thought about the sport, and longed for it, I would never admit it, because I’d failed. And every day, for the rest of my life, no matter what I did, I would be a failure. I continued to see Derrick because he spoke the truth, and I was so far from honesty that I needed to have a dose of it in my life or I would have forgotten what it was.

New Year’s Eve was approaching, and I had invited many of my old friends from Southie to celebrate the week in Manhattan. My roommates were going home to visit their parents for Christmas break, and so I told Piper, my good friend from Boston, to bring as many people as she wanted. She had recently come into a truckload of pills, more than I had ever seen, and when she arrived I bought a hundred Xanax. I vowed not to take any Klonopin, but that went out the window after the first Xanax hit me.

I don’t remember New Year’s Eve or the entire week after, but somewhere in that madness I spent my rent money on cocaine, ecstasy, pot, pills, beer, and heroin. I have a few memories of that week, but only horrible ones: hailing a cab on the Upper West Side, trying to hit on a straight guy who had killed his girlfriend a week before in a drunk-driving accident, throwing up in my kitchen sink that was full of dishes, and endless stories that Piper comically recalled. When I finally woke up, all my friends had gone. My roommates had returned and accused me of puking in the sink on their dishes without cleaning
it up. I denied knowing what they were talking about, even though I was guilty of doing exactly what they accused me of. My recollection of that week was vague, but I was so grateful I didn’t end up in jail, even though it would have been much safer than my freedom to roam around in New York City.

Darren began to rethink his life as he saw me spiral down a destructive path of debauchery and full-blown addiction. He decided to move back to Virginia to start over and to remove himself from the drugs and crazy lifestyle they brought. I felt terribly alone when he left.

Nick wasn’t visiting that much because of his work schedule, and Vicky had started her classes at a school in New Jersey. I was sniffing a lot of heroin and trying not to use before school. I had an early-morning biology class and would go out into the city’s freezing-cold winter, sniffling and dizzy, and get on a packed subway car downtown to Chambers Street. Once on the street, I paused before the Twin Towers for a moment, in awe of their ascension into the sky, before continuing to walk to school while cursing the morning and the happy people in the streets drinking their coffees. Those early morning risers’ ability to pull themselves together amazed me, and I figured they must be using cocaine since their appearance was so well put together. After class I would go home, get high, paint on my wall, and wish that all those I had fought with would return. Sometimes I snuck into my roommate’s room to steal a bunch of her Ambien to catch a buzz, but I had hit a plateau from all the medications I continued to ingest. The drugs were no longer doing what they used to do for me. It was getting harder and harder to erase the pain of my reality.