Fucking Daphne (7 page)

“Xanax, now there's a drug,” she said. Read:
I don't have any Vicodin and I'm onto you. If you want a Vicodin, you better slam twenty bucks or the phone number of Ira Silverberg or some other hipster agent on the table right now, and geesh, like, your whole surfer/biker look is so totally lazy and obvious. You think you're beyond being derivative of a manufactured white-trash aesthetic, but you're not.

I knew she was thinking this about me. I just knew.

“Do you have any more Lexapro?” she asked.

“Not on me.”

“Damn, I could really use one right now,” she said. She took the hair clip off her pinkie and set it in front of me like she was placing a bet. “My psychiatrist usually prescribes me what I want, but sometimes it's easier just to get it off the street. I swear that's
all psychiatrists are good for. I know what pills I need and when I need them.”

“Me too! I go on the Internet and research everything. It's like a hobby. Sometimes I'll find a pill on the ground—”

“—and you take it home and look it up on
Pillfinder.com
.”

“Pillfinder!!!”

We high-fived over the table.

I told her about the molecular structure of Gabapentin, also known as Neurontin, how it was basically a neurotransmitter in a pill. She explained the science behind hypnotics such as Ambien and Xanax, how they're worthless in combating real anxiety unless used in combination with an antidepressant.

“It's really fucked that I have to have a psychiatrist to give me pills. I know what pills I need, and I should be able to just go and buy them. Like Adderall. Adderall is a damn good reason to get up in the morning if you're depressed,” she said.

“I love Adderall!”
I enthused.

“For some reason, my psychiatrist lets me have an open prescription for Adderall, but I have to beg for the Lexapro,” she mused. “Doesn't make sense.”

At this point, little orange bottles of pills were doing the Macarena, the hootchy-kootchy, and the bunny hop simultaneously in my head. Daphne must have known how much I wanted a pill, any pill. Still, she didn't offer me any. If she was being intentionally sadistic, she hid it well. She was getting increasingly drunk on a third, then a fourth, Bushmills. She was slurring and going on about a person who was obsessed with her. The girl had made a collage out of her own dental records and mailed it to Daphne.

I ended up walking Daphne back to her apartment for the sole purpose of stealing her pills. I felt like a shithead. I mean, she was really crazy and I wasn't. I was just playing with the stuff. I could leave it behind and still function. The image Daphne painted in my mind of what she would be like without pharmaceuticals was like artist Paul McCarthy in his “dirty Santa” phase meets a lobotomized manatee meets a generic cat lady. How could she not totally hate me?

We got to her apartment. I asked her if I could use her bathroom and she said yes. I stole four Adderalls, three Xanax, a Klonopin, and an Ambien from her medicine cabinet. I came back out and read her face for any sign that she was onto me. There were none. In fact, Daphne's demeanor was so courteous and kind that it threw me off completely. I slipped an Adderall and swallowed it dry to meet the moment. She was obviously sleepy, but she took the time to show me books from her library, some of the more obscure Soft Skull paperbacks and a signed first edition of Philip K. Dick's
Valis.

“That book made me paranoid for a month. It didn't help that I read it while on phentermine,” I said, secretly kicking myself. It wasn't the time to talk about pills with the stolen ones in my pocket.

“Phentermine. Are you crazy?”

“It's gross, I know.”

“I actually managed to read
Valis
without anything speedy. Not so with
A Scanner Darkly.
It didn't help, though. I still couldn't finish it.”

“I couldn't finish it, either!”

In her apartment, Daphne made more sense to me. Her stuff domesticated her. She was way taller than me, and those breasts, they
made me feel like a little kid. She was the top in our situation, and most people in the know could work that into something epic, but all I could think of was that she was the teacher and I was the student. I used the college spin-the-bottle game from the night before, and reversed the roles to fuel what I thought needed to happen. I had to have sex with Daphne because I had stolen her pills. It was only fair.

“You have great hands,” I said. She was flipping through a graphic novel.

“Thanks,” she said, and continued turning the pages. She didn't get it. I got up and perused her bookshelf for a while. I went over and stood behind her and pulled her hair back off her shoulders.

“Do you want to move to the couch?” she said, and it was on. She yawned a lot. When we were making out, she would do these flourishes, like pull her hair back or her soccer sock up. The movements were sudden and sharp, and I couldn't tell if the aggression coming off of her was hostility or exhaustion or even something as simple as a signature nervous tic, a label, the Daphne Flourish.

The sex was basic. I fucked her with some fingers; she did the same back. At some point I took my jeans off because I was afraid she'd want to feel my ass, and hence would feel the pills in my back pocket. It was a very out-of-body, I'm-watching-myself-as-if-I'mon-cable kind of sex—sex for the purpose of using the images later, writer sex, bad sex. I pretty much felt nothing, save the charge the fantasies in my own head were generating. I'm sure it didn't help that she was continuing to get catatonically drunk on a leftover bottle of Myers's rum just as my Adderall was seriously kicking in.

Afterward, we lay on opposite ends of the couch, facing each other. I put my pants back on. She checked her phone messages and
looked remorseful that, with a guest, it would be too rude to call those people back until later. I talked a lot about what I was writing and other stuff I can't remember. She fell asleep. Before leaving, I went back into the bathroom and stole a few more pills.

Needless to say, I feel bad about all of this and want to be a better person. Some people make themselves available as an audience for the worst version of another person. Daphne is one of those people. I took advantage of that opportunity to reveal my most monstrous self, thinking that doing so would change things, make something better, but it didn't.

I tried writing about it the next day in a café, but it was all just notes and I crossed most of it out. I couldn't write about what happened at all, only about feelings and general themes. These are the words beneath the crossed-out lines:

I left the Bay Area, went on with my life, and got an email from a friend three months later. Apparently, this friend had access to Daphne's private postings on her LiveJournal page. Here's the forward:

Ouch. Okay.

I thought for months about writing Daphne, but I couldn't think of anything to say. Plus, I wasn't supposed to have read the post in the first place. The words were true and untrue in equal measure, existing lies I can't undo.

After reading her post, I stopped drinking and taking pills for eight months.

I started up again at a country-western bar in Pioneertown the night Dave Alvin showed up and played unannounced. He played “Dry River,” and I went up to the bar and ordered a double shot of Herradura Silver. There was no thought process involved. It was as instinctual as opening a door.

 

 

H
er bathroom strikes me as strange.

The walls are colored a benign coat of beige and are not at all splattered with oozing stains or fist-size holes. The mirror is wholly absent of cracks and trauma. As for the lightbulb, it isn't manically flickering like a slasher-film prop; rather, it glows with lucidity, sheathed in a standard glass fixture. On top of the toilet tank is a little bowl filled with pink-hued bath beads, the sight of which brings on memories from the late '80s of my childhood babysitter. Bath beads were appropriate in Mrs. Thomson's lavatory, given her frightening obsession with lawn ornaments and ceramic doohickeys. In Daphne's bathroom, however, the small, rubbery, perfumed balls seem out of place and oddly perverse.

Then I notice that the toilet brush holder on the floor has been elaborately decorated with dozens of sinister-looking plastic skulls.
Likewise, the shower curtain features a pattern of dancing skeletons.
That's more like it,
I think, lifting the padded toilet seat.

The dingy Belgian pub we had just come from was having a special on a brew called “the Brutal Bitter.” They came in tall, outcurved glasses that looked like beakers in some blackhearted science experiment.

Feeling wobbly, I decide it is probably better to sit down to drain my aching bladder. I stare at the row of hand towels hanging on the rack across from me. I reach down by my ankles and fish around in my pants pockets for my wallet. I open it and Julie is there. The photo has been in the little clear holder for over a year, and it's beginning to fade. She's looking not at me, but at a book she was reading for a class. She is wearing small cotton shorts and a tank top, and her hair falls across her face and down the side of the bed in a way that used to make me feel warm. I poke my finger behind the picture until I feel a small, hard lump and I pull it out. I cradle the diamond-shaped blue pill in my palm and think about how much of it I should take. After calculating my level of drunkenness and the last time I jerked off, I bite the pill in half and stuff the remaining portion back into my wallet. The pill is bitter and chalky and the taste quickly fills my mouth. I wash all of it down with a highball of whisky and set the glass back down on the sink counter.

I stand, zip up, and look at myself in the mirror. I make my eyes big, then small, mimicking the bemused expression my friends made earlier when I told them I was going home with the six-foot-something dreadlocked woman (ten years my senior) with tattoos and steel-toe boots. They never asked her name. I splash water on my face, thinking that if I were to disappear tonight, no one would
know where to look for me. On the other side of the door, I can hear Daphne. A drawer opens and closes. Ice cubes clink in a glass. Already, I can feel the tingling between my legs.

Rewind three months. I'm on the phone, asking about allergy medication. The nurse from the hospital hotline is helpful and sets me up with an appointment to see a doctor.