Crystal Clean (7 page)

But it’s different with Andy. When we’re with his Uncle Chuck, and his cousins are calling him Dad, Andy will replace “Uncle Chuck” (and sometimes Mom) with Dad. Not a problem. To Andy, it’s just a word
-
a label
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and nothing more.

I’m all he’s ever needed. He just needed me to be whole. I was well into my recovery when I had this epiphany, and I went from feeling guilty for not giving him what I thought I should have, to feeling guilty for almost destroying the only thing he really ever needed: me. I felt guilty then, I felt guilty in early recovery and I still feel guilty sometimes. I would have made a great Catholic.

One Tuesday night, while getting high, I started looking through the phone book for people I used to know. I sat and smoked, looking up names of people I remembered from grade school, high school and some that I went to college with. I had no intention, really, of calling anyone. I remember simply wanting to
feel some kind of connection with people when I was doing it. Like an affirmation that there were others out there who were probably leading normal lives.

I remembered a guy I knew from high school who I’d spent time with in my late 20’s, and found his name in the phone book as well. I had thought of him over the years and after a couple of days, decided to call the number listed for Allan in the phone book. When his wife answered, she told me they had been divorced for about a year and a half. She knew Allan and I had spent a lot of time together when we were in our twenties though, and thought he would want to hear from me.

I was nervous as I dialed, wondering if he’d even remember me, but there was a tiny spark inside me. A spark of hope, I suppose, that he would remember and I’d have someone to talk to.

“Hey, Allan. It’s Kim. Do you remember me?”

“Kim! Oh my
God
! Of course I remember you. How are you doing? It’s been a long time. How did you get my number?” Allan was possibly the most gregarious person I had ever known. He always seemed happy, even mischievous, with a boyish excitement about him that had always lifted my spirits if I was down and elated me when I wasn’t. Hearing his voice that night stirred my heart a little from its atrophied state and I smiled for the first time in weeks. His enthusiasm was contagious as it bubbled over the airwaves.

Allan and I first met in high school. We had a class together our senior year. We knew each other but he was a mullet-haired, partier-jock and I was high all the time, coming to school stoned almost every day.

The next time we met, we were in our late twenties. I was playing pool by myself at a bar and he was there with a friend playing darts. There wasn’t anything odd about it. People tend to stay in Boise after high school to attend B.S.U. or enter the work force. Even when people leave to go to school, work or just to find themselves, they often end up coming home. Boise is a wonderful place to raise a family. There’s a strong sense of community, relatively low crime rate, and we’re surrounded by mountains for skiing and lakes for fishing and boating. It’s also the cleanest city I’ve ever seen. If you see a gum wrapper on the sidewalk, chances are it won’t be there the next day.

It’s not unusual to run into people you grew up with or to
maintain friendships with the people you went to first grade with. So when I ran into Allan and his friend, it was a nice surprise.

I bought them a pitcher of beer and spent the rest of the afternoon with him, drinking and playing pool. We were instantly attracted to each other. We could talk for hours about everything and nothing. He had a contagious laugh and a penchant for mischief that fit perfectly with my lifestyle. For the next year or so, Allan and I spent as much time together as we could, despite the fact that he was married with a child on the way. With his wife at home pregnant, he spent a lot of time out with his friends, so she was used to his absences in the evenings. I sometimes felt sorry for her, sitting alone night after night, waiting for their child to be born, but I never felt guilty because, after all, Allan and I were just friends. I rationalized our friendship because I felt so good when I was with him. The crush I had on him and my daydreams of what it might be like if he weren’t married were harmless, I thought. I had never been an adulteress and did not intend to get involved with a married man.

That’s what I told myself in order to shun any guilt I might have had about the situation. The truth is
-
and this became a pattern during my active addiction
-
I was disrespecting other women: driving a wedge between my sisters and myself.

I used to say that I didn’t get along with other women.
I like men better
, I’d say. For years, I had very little interaction with other females. There were a few I sold meth or pot to, but mostly I saw them as irritants on the periphery of my world. They were the wives and girlfriends of the men I spent time with. They were party-poopers. They wanted their men at home instead of out doing drugs and boozing with me (whether they were aware of me or not.) I was cheating with their men, and I knew that on a not so deep level. Not physically, but cheating doesn’t always involve sex.

I knew what I was doing, although I would never admit it to myself, but it wasn’t really about the women. It was about control, and men. If the cheating were sexual, I wasn’t interested. But there was something extremely satisfying about being constantly surrounded by men who chose me over the women in their lives. If there was sexual tension as well, all the better.

At the time, of course, nothing was this clear, but looking at the situation with sober eyes, it makes perfect sense:

Will you go with me?

Yes

No

Unlike grade school, though, I was in control.

I was into cocaine when Allan and I started spending so much time together, and I charmed him with my ability to write his name in the white powder instead of cutting the boring lines everyone else did. I threw midnight poker parties and he came as often as he could. When we were together, my heart beat faster. I was like a schoolgirl with her first crush. By then he had shed his high school mullet
-
thank
God
-
and he was breathtaking. He looked like a rugged version of Woody Harrelson. Allan was a man’s man
-
muscular and strong with eyes that saw places inside me no one had ever seen.

One night, we were alone at my house watching a movie. It was around 10:30 when he asked me to massage his back. I had long ago learned that “massage” was a code word for foreplay. Although I told myself it was innocent, I was thrilled at the chance to touch him as I’d wanted to for so long. He lay on the floor and I straddled him. Shortly after I started, he reached back, moved my shorts aside, and touched the upper inside of my thigh. I froze. He rolled over, pushed me to the floor and started kissing me.

It was raw and powerful. He was the most sexually exciting man I had ever known. When he told me he had wanted me since he saw me in the bar that day, my base instincts kicked into overdrive, and I became a whirling, lusting dervish. I discovered a new use for every room in my house. He made me ravenous for sex.

The next day, we talked about what had happened. Our attraction was mutually animalistic, so we couldn’t go back to the way we were before. We wouldn’t be able to keep our hands off each other. But we also knew we couldn’t see each other again the way we had. He was the first to speak.

“Kim, I can’t do this.”

“I know.” I didn’t want to know, but I did.

“I’ve got a baby on the way and I’ve never cheated on my wife before.” He looked away from me. “I cheated on my first wife. Before and during our marriage. We both did. In fact, it happened so much, I don’t even remember who cheated first. But this time I wanted it to be different. And it has been. Until last night.” He looked back at me. “I didn’t think I’d feel guilty like this, but I do.”

We were both quiet for a few minutes. What could I say? As much as I wanted him
-
especially right then
-
what he was saying
made me want him even more. Regardless of what happened the night before, I saw him as gallant.

“I don’t think we should see each other anymore, Kim.”

I agreed, wanting to seem adult about the situation, but when he left, only fifteen minutes after he’d arrived, I lay down on my bed and cried myself to sleep.

Vagueness lends itself to rationalization, but once a thing is tangible, there’s no denying its reality. There can be debate about various forms of infidelity: emotional, spiritual, intellectual, time spent in Internet chat rooms and on porn sites. But when it comes to sex, the line is salient. Sex = adultery.

Just as hitting = abuse. When the man I was briefly married to punched me in the head, I refused to let it happen again. It only took one hit for me to throw him out and divorce him, because hitting is salient. Other types of abuse aren’t always as obvious. Emotional and mental abuse, as with infidelity, is more complicated because it’s so hard to define. It’s vague, and therefore, easy to rationalize.
I’m not really an adulteress if we’re not having sex. If I’m not being smacked around, it’s not abuse
. I have no problem with saliency; it’s in the gray that I struggle.

In recovery, there’s a lot of talk about boundaries or, in my case, the lack of them. Having boundaries is all about keeping yourself safe. You say, “No, I will not do this. No, I will not allow that to happen to me. Yes, this is okay, but no, that isn’t.”

It’s about knowing who you are and taking care of yourself. Boundaries are integrity. To be blunt, if you’re too chicken-shit to stand up for yourself, you’ll allow people to walk all over you. For a long time, I was a chicken-shit. I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, even if it meant that mine were.

A lack of boundaries looks like this:

“Hey, Kim. Can you do me this favor?”

Shit. I’ve got fifty million things to do, I’m late for my appointment, the pot on the stove just boiled over and I haven’t brushed my teeth yet today.

“Absolutely!”

Having boundaries looks like this:

“Hey, Kim. Can you do me a favor?”

“Actually, no. I’m late for an appointment and I have to brush my teeth. By the way, can you clean up that mess on the stove?”

But salient boundaries are easy to see, and Allan and I crossed the line. The thing was, whether real or contrived, Allan’s
regret made me like him even more, and that made losing him all the more tragic. 

I replayed our night together a thousand times in my head over the years, and often hoped he would call. Even though we only had sex that one night, I could never get it out of my mind and no one has compared with him since. But I didn’t see or hear from him until the night I called him seven years later when my loneliness turned to selfishness. I hoped he would remember me. I hoped he wasn’t seeing anyone.

I hoped that, maybe, he’d want to get high.

“I’m good, I’m good. I talked to your wife, well, ex-wife I understand, and she gave me your number. She said she thought you would want to hear from me.”

“I can’t believe she did that, but I’m so glad she did! Are you in Boise? What are you doing these days?”

“I’m in Boise, yeah. Not doing much. Same old thing I guess. What about you? Are you still in Boise?”

“When I’m home I am. Right now I’m in Florida.”

“What? What the hell are you doing in Florida?”

He laughed. “I drive long haul. I’m only in Boise for a few days a month between runs.”

“Are you driving now? I don’t want to bother you.”

“No, I’m at a truck stop. Just about to get a couple hours sleep.” I closed my eyes and tried to imagine him in the cab of an eighteen-wheeler, at night, in a truck stop parking lot talking to me on his cell phone. “I’m watching the lot lizards.”

“The what?”

“The lot lizards. They’re at every truck stop.” I envisioned some kind of iguana or gecko. I didn’t understand why he would be watching them. I figured there must be some kind of invasion of them, like locusts, and I felt better thinking of him sitting high up in his truck.

“What are you talking about, Allan?”

“The lot lizards.” He repeated. “They’re at every truck stop.” All I could see was a torn up, redneck version of a giant iguana: The kind that haunted trailer parks and cut their teeth on lawn furniture. I could understand why he would be watching them. I was morbidly fascinated, and I was almost three thousand miles away. I wasn’t sure of the extent of the invasion in Florida, but I felt better knowing he was safe in his truck, out of reach of the
gnashing teeth of the wild beasts.

“Really? Are there a lot of them?”

“Oh,
God
.
They’re everywhere. Every truck stop. They’re interesting to watch, though. I’m just sitting here smoking and watching them before I catch some sleep.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to...I can let you go if you’re tired.”

“No way! I’m glad you called. Don’t you dare hang up on me now.”