The Cocaine Chronicles (23 page)

Once, I saw Monster walking alone in the middle of a pack of trained attack dogs like he was fucking Saint Francis of Assisi Security trailed behind him, skulking near the bushes, maintaining that illusion of privacy he demands. The dogs smelled me, and though I was trying to back away from the encounter, too late, they charged forward, frothing and kicking sod.

Monster looked for a moment like he had no idea of who I was, the man he hired to cook for him and his family. I raised my walking stick to bash a dog before the others mauled me, but an impulse of self-preservation kicked in and I shouted my name just as the dogs charged.

“It’s me, Gibson! The cook!”

Security shouted something in German, and the dogs stopped in mid-stride.

I heard Monster’s voice, high and nasal, a near whine: “Oh, you scared me.”

“Sorry,” I said, and hurried on in the opposite direction. I caught a glimpse of him in the moonlight—bundled in a parka, though that night the temperature was mild, walking with hands clasped behind his back, serenely in thought. Security caught up and escorted me back to my bungalow, which was more and more a jail cell and less the attractive perk of a rent-free cottage in the beautiful Santa Ynez mountains, the selling point to compensate for a modest salary. Security looked me in the eye and told me to watch it, don’t forget who pays the bills.

“Monster does,” I said, nodding to show, even if Security wasn’t buying it, that I was a team player. It didn’t go well. He looked for a second as though I might be jerking his chain, then turned to go, but not before jotting down something in a small gray notebook. I’m sure some notation scheduling another background check.

I didn’t mind.

When you work for someone with great wealth you learn quickly that you really do serve them.

You learn to be blind, deaf, and dumb, if that’s what they need.

Monster needs all that.

Sometimes I see things that don’t add up, that make me nervous.

I wanted isolation, but not like this.

The night sky has too many stars; the moon hangs like a gaudy lantern illuminating a path to my bungalow.

I’ve never felt so alone.

I know what goes on there, behind those hedges, those walls, gates, and sensors.

He’s a monster and every day I serve him.

I’m not inclined toward depression, upbeat and all that is how folks describe me, but that was because of the drugs.

Married, living on the Lower East Side in a nice co-op, part owner of Euro Pane, a restaurant with witty angular (the publicist came up with that), Puglia-inspired cuisine that people wanted to spend good hard cash on, you’d think I’d be more than happy, but in truth it was too much for me. Maybe I couldn’t stand prosperity, and with things going so well I knew my luck couldn’t continue on the upside, something would give and I’d find myself flat on my face. Instead of waiting, I went for it, leaped for the pipe and returned to a long-dormant cocaine habit. If I needed to make an excuse, more so to myself than anyone else, I could offer that the restaurant was overwhelming, and I needed relief from the day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month, relentless grind, the kind where you wake yourself with the sound of your teeth grinding. The kind of stress that makes a man long for a hit off a crack pipe.

Ten years ago when I indulged in smoking a little cocaine, I handled it, but now was different. Then it was about staying up to dawn, for the second day, clubbing until I was sick of the whole idea of clubbing. Working and playing, trying to have everything, and it worked until I couldn’t stand living like that. I gave it up, put down the pipe and cocaine easily. Proved to myself that cocaine didn’t have me by the balls. Suddenly I noticed I had so much more money in my bank account, and I met Elena, fell in love, and that was that. It really was a good thing, and I handled it smoothly so smoothly I had it in the back of my mind that I could do it again. It wouldn’t be no thing. But, I guess, shit has a way of catching up with you after a while. My addiction was like a cancer cell, dormant, kicking it until the conditions were right. Probably, the truth is I don’t have the same discipline or constitution. I’m not that young man who could do that, keep it going, burning myself out in every direction. Soon enough I lost the restaurant to my partner, and my wife found my fucked-up, vulgar habit reason enough to leave me. I don’t blame her. She didn’t marry a fiend, I became one, it just took time for me to discover it, my inclination toward self-immolation. I call it that, the suicidal impulse to consume yourself with a Bic lighter. I’d see myself burned out, gone, a neat pile of ashes, but that’s more acceptable to my imagination than the vision of myself as a pathetic, cracked-lip panhandler, a martyr to the pipe.

Maybe I wanted to fail, see how far I could fall.

Far and hard.

Lucifer had nothing on me.

Being broke is like having a bloody mouth and loose teeth and there’s not a thing you can do about it, except stand it.

How does that song go?

“A knife, a fork, a bottle, and a cork—that’s the way we spell
New York … I got Cocaine running around my brain.”

Something like that, but I’m not judging.

I thought I could master my high. I wish I had the courage to have stayed in the city for everyone to see me living in a halfway house, trying to reassemble the remaining shards of self-respect.

What if I ran into her, Elena, my wife?

It’s wrong to say that, we’re more divorced than married, but far as I’m concerned she still is. Funny how memory works. When you don’t fill it with anything new, it replays what maybe you don’t want replayed.

My mind replays Elena.

Short, with hair like the blackest ink, strong legs and ass, a delicate face, almost Japanese, like a geisha in a Ukiyo-e print.

Passionate about love and making money and everything else.

Passionate about hating me.

I still love her, though it’s hopeless to think she’ll ever love me again. I want her back more than the restaurant, a reputation, everything, but it will never happen, not in this life and not the next.

Left with nothing, other than to lie in bed and think about what I’ve done, hurt the woman I love and lost her, didn’t consider the consequences back then, didn’t have bouts of guilt, didn’t consider anything. It was about me, about what’s good for the head. You know, the head. A selfish bitch, that’s the truth about me. About me, that’s all it ever was, my love was a fraud, my professionalism a joke, my self-respect, delusion.

And I’ll never get it back; you’d think I’d find the courage to do something dramatic, maybe kill myself or find God. No, I indulged in self-pity, waiting to be saved from myself.

Elena partied hard, but you know, it didn’t get to her. She did it all—heroin, coke, ecstasy—but when she was through with it, she was through. Maybe it was yoga or the StairMaster, but mostly it was because Elena wanted a baby, and she’s that type of person, so directed and focused that she didn’t stop to think that the rest of the world, and by that I mean me, might not be able to live the way she managed to. It took forever for her to see that I had a weakness. Never raised an eyebrow when, after a sharing a few lines, I excused myself to go to the bathroom to do a few more. She even laughed when she saw me fumbling to put everything away, hastily brushing white powder from my face, more evidence of my lack of control.

It was funny in a way. She should have noticed that I was craving, fiending, whatever you want to call it. I had started my downward journey, my decline—in it to win it, a new life consisting of one long, sustained need to stay high.

My recollection of conversations with Elena replay themselves, and I listen to myself ruin my marriage.

“We’re four months behind on the mortgage?” Elena asked.

“No, I don’t think it’s that far along. Maybe two months,” I replied.

“What happened to the money? We’ll lose the apartment.”

“Things got away from me. I’m sure we can put something together to work this out.”

“What are the chances of that happening?” I shrugged. I didn’t want to lie to her.

“Do you know what you’re doing to us, the fact that you can’t control yourself? Why don’t you admit it, stop being in denial.”

She looked at me with smoldering, black eyes.

“You need professional help.”

“I don’t have that kind of problem.”

“You’re forcing me—no, you’re giving me no choice but to leave you.”

“Come on,” I said. “We’ll work this out.”

This time she laughed bitterly.

“Sure we will,” she said, but we both knew that was a lie.

After that she moved in with a friend and refused to talk to me, but that particular humiliation didn’t sting much because later that week in court I pled guilty and was sentenced to nine months in a minimum-security prison.

In some sense I was content to be going, having done enough damage to my self-esteem that I wanted to crawl away into a corner and wait for the room to stop spinning. And when it did, I woke up to the humiliation of getting processed, prepped, and more to go to the place to do my time. My only regret is that I wasn’t high during that humiliation.

The days inside prison weren’t totally unpleasant. They had a good enough library, and I spent time lifting weights for the first time in my life. That’s it, I thought, do positive things for myself while incarcerated and avoid being raped, but in a minimum-security prison, the only thing I had to worry about was getting athlete’s foot in the shower.

I had hoped to hear from Elena at some point, but after months had passed, I began to wonder if I would.

When I was released and moved to the halfway house, she wrote and said she would be coming to visit so I could sign the papers.

Divorce papers.

I tried not to allow those words to rise to the surface. I waited with far too much hope on that moment when she’d appear at the door of the halfway house to be shown inside by one of the workers, who would sign her in and bring me out to sit across from her on the worn couch. Me, smiling stupidly, thinking, feverishly hoping, that her seeing me again would jar something loose and she’d want to forget about the divorce. It was what it was, paperwork.

She wore all black, tight wool skirt and a sweater that looked good on her, but she kept her arms crossed, probably remembering how much I liked her small breasts.

I don’t think she ever smiled. Talked to me about some issues, bankruptcy, insurance policy. Nothing I was interested in. I was interested in her, but that was dead.

I was dead to her.

She took it personally, like I had rejected her for cocaine, but it wasn’t like that.

How did she ask it?

“How could you be so fucking stupid? Getting yourself arrested buying crack on the subway?”

I shrugged. I guess if it was the first time, she might have been able to excuse it, but it wasn’t.

To this day I don’t know how stupid I am. I don’t think I’ve plumbed the depths of my stupidity, and when I do, I plan to get back to her. I’ll have charts and graphs, a PowerPoint demonstration.

I ruined my life, I know that, last thing I wanted to do was betray her, but I was good at that, too, excelled at it, even. Asha, the woman who ran the halfway house, realized I could cook South Asian. Being Gujarati she was surprised that I made a better bindi, spiced eggplant, than her mother. She discovered that I could stay in seclusion in a sweltering kitchen cooking up meals for the dozen or so losers that lived at the halfway house. I labored away in silent grief, working with old vegetables, day-old bread, not much meat, which pleased Asha because she didn’t like the smell, some chicken, beans, lots of beans. I came up with meal after meal through backbreaking efficiency and invention. When I wasn’t cooking, I cleaned. I scoured that kitchen, boiled water, added cupfuls of caustic soap, cleaned the filthy ceiling, cleaned everything. Made it spotless, and kept it that way as long as I was there, my six months climbing out of the black hole of my life.

Cooking and cleaning and not thinking was a meditative balm. I hated when thoughts would slither in on their own and have their way with me. Grief caught me slipping, I needed to see her. Thought of leaving, blowing the whole thing off, my contract with the halfway house staff, to make a run to see her, force her to listen to me.

I’d go to prison, and I had sense enough to know I didn’t want that. Maybe I might have tried, maybe prison would have been worth it, if I got her to listen to me, but in reality I had no words left to beg with.

I was out of prayers and I was sick of lighting candles to the saint of hopeless causes.

She was gone, maybe here, probably some other city.

“It’s for the best,” my caseworker said, when I confessed why I wouldn’t talk in therapy.

“It’s not about the drugs. It’s about losing my wife.”

“Drugs are why you lost her. You drove her away.”

I cried then, in front of that fool. I stopped talking to him after that. Before, I felt like maybe he was okay.

I was wrong.

Up until that moment, I didn’t want to do cocaine again. I really was through with it.