The Cocaine Chronicles (9 page)
For me, that one person would have to be my ex-wife, though Nina runs a close second. For Eddie, it’s his deceased mother, the only person, he says, he ever truly loved. In my case, the wrongdoings go back further than I can possibly recall, but at the top of that list are the many nights I didn’t call or come home. These are followed by the needless arguments and turbulent mood swings. Then come all the promises I made to quit and never kept, not to mention the thousands and thousands of wasted dollars I put up my nose or drank away at some bar. All this and more I put into that letter, writing deep into the night, long after Eddie’s fallen asleep. It comes out to thirty-two handwritten pages—or that’s where I stop anyway. Toward the early morning hours my eyes grow heavy and I drop off.
I don’t put much stock into the importance of dreams. I don’t believe much in symbols or hidden, subconscious meanings. In fact, I rarely ever remember my dreams. But this one is different. It’s the kind that seems so real that when you wake up, for those first few seconds, you’re absolutely certain it happened. That you were there. That you
are
there. In it I’m sitting at the edge of a dock looking out over the ocean, and beside me is a bottle of vodka. I know I’m not supposed to drink it. I know if I do I’ll erase all the progress I’ve made. That it’ll trigger the craving. And once the craving is on, I’ll be off and running—next stop, the dopeman’s house. But I pick up the bottle anyway. I uncap it. I raise it to my lips and drink, and I can taste it, I can feel it going down, the actual burning sensation in the back of my throat. This is where I wake up, flooded with guilt for having drank again, and then relieved, suddenly, when I realize it’s only a dream.
Now the room is just beginning to grow light. Outside the sun is rising, and I roll out of bed. I go to the bathroom and douse my face with water. What happens next is totally out of character for me, but I get down on my knees in front of the sink. I place my hands together. I close my eyes.
Part of me feels silly.
Part of me wants to believe. In what, in whom, I have no idea. And the funny thing is, for me, it doesn’t really matter. It is after all the act, not the message, that ultimately gives form to prayer.
Frank Delia
JERRY STAHL
is the author of the narcotic memoir
Permanent Midnight,
made into a movie starring Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson, as well as the novels
Perv—A Love Story,
Plainclothes Naked,
and
I, Fatty.
s
o it’s 1980-something. I’m nowhere.
Suzy, this older white lady I buy cocaine from, tells me she’ll give me a free gram if I help her do some.
I say, “Sure, why not?”
She says, “Exactly.” Then, before my eyes, she gets on her hands and knees on the cat pee–marinated shag carpet. She raises the salmon nightie she lives in, exposing a pair of sixty-three-year-old, weirdly hot, baby-smooth ass cheeks, which she introduces as Heckel and Jeckel’s albino cousins. Jiggling her cheeks the way body builders will jiggle their pecs, left-right-left, she makes them talk to each other.
“Heckel likes to get spanked. Bad little crow!”
“Jeckel, you’re such a freak.”
After fifteen minutes, or maybe a day, Suzy pretends to get annoyed with her chatty buttocks. She tells them to shut up. As I zone in and out, grinning like I haven’t seen Miss Chatty Cheeks 5,000 times already, I am simultaneously wondering how long I can go without asking/begging/stealing another hit, and obsessing on the name of the guy who did Topo Gigio on
Ed Sullivan
.
By the time I write this, I am acutely aware of how old remembering
The Ed Sullivan Show
makes me. Tennessee Williams routinely
shaved a year off his age. When people caught him he’d explain
that he didn’t count the year he worked in a shoe store. I sometimes
think the same could be done with drug years. They don’t count.
Though probably they count more. Like dog years. My liver, in
point of fact, is well over a hundred. It sometimes forgets its own
name and will doubtless be placed in a rest home by the time you
read this.
Suzy’s TV is always on with the sound off. After a while you begin to think the rays soak into your head and over the blood brain barrier with the rest of the shit you’re putting in there. Suzy resembles Miss Hathaway, Mr. Drysdale’s horsy secretary on
The Beverly
Hillbillies
—if Miss Hathaway had been locked in a dark room and force-fed Kents, cocaine, and gin for twenty-seven years, while bathed in color Sony light.
She reaches back and hands me a straw, a regular sweetheart. “Okay, soldier, pack some in there.”
“In the straw?”
“In my
ass
. Jesus! How dumb are you? Put some powder in the straw, put the straw in my ass, and blow.”
“I’ve done worse for less,” I say with a shrug, trying to convey an emotion I do not even remotely feel. In fact, there is actual screaming in my head, a voice that sounds alarmingly like Jimmy Swaggart. (More TV-adjacent damage; I might as well be in the box, getting transmissions directly into my pineal gland.) I am never not awake Sunday morning at 4, when Jimmy comes on in my neck of the world.
Am I nervous or am I happy?
Why are you staring?
Fuck, HELICOPTERS!
Right before I angle toward the target, I start to feel chiggers under my skin, and I fight the urge to scratch myself bloody digging them out. This is when I hear Jimmy Swaggart start speaking directly to me: “Hey, loser! You’re about to blow drugs into the anus of a woman old enough to be your mother. You know what Jesus says about that?”
Happily, I am so cocaine-depleted I instantly forget that I’m aurally hallucinating, and that I itch. You don’t know you’re having a white-out until you come out of it. I just kind of
blink to
. I remember that I’m trying to keep my thumb pressed on one end of the straw while I slip the other end in Suzy’s pink O without spilling any coke. (Her sphincter, for reasons I can’t fathom, makes me think of a dog toy.) I hold my breath, mouth poised by the business end of the tube, the length of a
TV Guide
away from the bull’s eye. I have a weird pain in my spleen. Though I’m not sure where my spleen is. I just know it’s unhealthy. And I should go to a dentist, too. I can only chew with the left rear corner of my mouth.
“When I say do it,
do
it!” Suzy says, and launches into some kind of Kundalini fire-breathing that expands and puckers her chosen coke portal. For one bad moment I am eyeball to eyeball with a jowly, Ray Harryhausen Cyclops, who won’t stop leering at me. Then I avert my gaze and take in the pictures of Suzy’s dead B-celebrity husband on the wall. The Teddy Shrine . . .
That’s
better
. Suzy met her late husband when she was a call girl. (Many of her clients were half-washed-up New York stage actors.) In a career lull, Teddy appeared in a number of
Three Stooges
vehicles. But not, as Suzy would interject when she repeated the story— which she did
no more than ten times a night—“
the good
Three
Stooges
. . .” Teddy made his Stooge ascendance in the heyday of Joe DeRita, the Curly-replacement nobody liked. “Twilight of the Stooges,” Suzy would sigh. “People even liked Shemp better than they liked DeRita.”
Suzy worked a finite loop of peripheral celebrity anecdotes … Bennett Cerf liked to be dressed like a baby and have his diaper changed … Broderick Crawford liked to give girls pony rides. Goober from
Andy Griffith
was hung like a roll of silver dollars but had a dime-size hole burned in his septum. She also claimed that her apartment on Ivar, a cottage cheese–ceilinged studio a short stagger up from Franklin, used to belong to Nathanael West. I can still see her tearing up, missing a dear friend: “The midget from
Day of the Locust
died the same day John Lennon was shot.”
I spent more time with Suzy than my own wife, which is a whole other story. After a certain point, junkies are rarely missed when they’re not home. (If they happen to have a home—as opposed to a place they still have keys to, from which they can steal small appliances.)
A half-second before I think she is ready to blast off, Suzy abruptly turns around and chuckles. “I ever tell you how much Larry Fine loved his blow? The man was a hedonist … How do you think his hair got that way? He wanted to be the white Cab Calloway but it never worked out.”
Luckily I don’t spill anything. Did I mention the white-outs? I did, didn’t I? Why am I telling this story? It’s not even a story. It’s just, like, a snippet from a loop. Like Suzy’s bottom-feeding monologues. I don’t have memories. I just have nerves that still hurt in my brain. Shooting coke does that. Even more than smoking it, when you fixed you could just wipe the inside of your skull clean as porcelain. Coke was about toilets and toilets were shiny white. Especially at 4 a.m. with the lights on and the bathroom door locked. Sometimes the blood in your head would crash over your eyeballs and you’d just go blind for a while, but you wouldn’t notice till you could see again—when you came back and realized you were standing there, knuckles buckling, one hand propped on the wall, the other compulsively flushing and re-flushing the toilet, for the whoosh that could make you come.
I’ve done okay since getting off all of it—the dope and the cocaine—
but I still think, much as the smack destroyed my liver, the coke shorted
my synapses. All systems will be firing and then, next thing I know,
I’ll blink into vision again and realize I’ve gone blank. It’s not so much
as if the power’s been diminished, it’s as if the power just suddenly … goes out. Can we feel anything as sharply as the absence of a specific
feeling?
What the fuck does that mean?
What was I just talking about?
Never mind. It’s not coming back.
When I think about getting high, what I remember, viscerally,
is not the dope rush—those faded years before I stopped the dope—I
remember the coke hitting, that fork-in-the-heart jolt, like you
dipped your toe in a puddle and tongue-kissed a toaster.
Before the needle was halfway down, you could see God’s eyes
roll back in His head.
So I twitch back and there’s this gaping Eberhard Faber eraser-colored hole, two hummocky cheeks yanked open, scarlet chipped fingernails against baby skin.
“Hey, Whitey Ford, throw the dart through the hula hoop, dammit! What’s the puzzle!?”
So (first time’s always the hardest) with no further ado, I stick the straw into Suzy’s ass, careful not to inhale, and blow the Pixy Stix’s worth of flake into her alimentary canal, or whatever it is, and watch the teeny mouth shut tight around its deposit.
Suzy squirms. “Unggghh-uhhhh … Oh God …
NNNNNNGGGGGG!
”
Then she twists her head around, glassy-eyed. “
I’m a regular
Venus flytrap
!”
That’s when I realize I left the straw in her. I look everywhere but it’s gone. Sucked right up with the blow. Should I tell her? Would she get mad when she found out? What if she cut me off? Or was there some kind of ass-acid that could eat a straw to pulp—so she’d never know?
Suzy mistakes my panic and paralysis for awe. “Impressive, right?” Smacking herself on the flank, she adds, “I used to smuggle guns for the Panthers in there. There’s a man named Jackson who could tell you some stories, if he was in a position to tell anybody anything.”
Then she giggles, doing a little wiggly thing with her bottom. “A lot of guys paid a lot of money to be where you are right now! Now blow some more, Daddy. Blow! Blow! Blow!”
I reload from a Musso & Franks ashtray full of powder and go in for Round Two. Her capacious anus quivers like some blind baby bird. And this time (with a fresh straw) I close my eyes, unload the blow, then quickly get up and weave into the bathroom to shake up a shot. I should put some dope in but can’t find it—and can’t wait—and before I have the needle out I’m on the floor, doing the floppy-fish. It takes everything I have to slap a chunk of tar on tin foil and take a puff to stop the convulsion. I make it back out to the living room. (Blinds always pulled, no day or night, like a one-woman keno lounge.) I never saw Suzy get off her couch to pee. I never saw her eat. I never saw her do anything but cocaine, generally up her nose—or, on special occasions, the odd ass-blow.
Suzy didn’t geeze, she thought it was low class. She left the freebasing to her roommate, Sidney, a shut-in who could generally be found in his room, sniffing a pillow between hits. Sidney hadn’t left his room, Suzy liked to say, since
The Rockford Files
was new. His claim to fame was playing drums behind Lenny Bruce at a Detroit strip club.
I didn’t have any money, so I would keep Suzy company. I never had to be anywhere.
Suzy is still talking when I come back from the bathroom. She never stopped talking. It was not quite white noise. Suzy’s clients were a talk show host, a couple of soap stars, a slew of jingle musicians, one name actor who required oz’s mailed to him on the set, and my favorite, a TV evangelist famous for his high-rise hair and his multi-hour rants from a cowhide chair in Pasadena.
“I know what you’re thinking.”
Suzy’s voice is jagged with pleasure. Her nose so permanently blown out she sounds like she’s just unplugged her iron lung. “You’re thinking, ‘Suzy musta stole the ass-blow move from Stevie Nicks.’ Well, you’re wrong, baby. It’s apocryphal. Stevie Nicks kept a guy on the payroll whose only job was to blow coke up her ass. Well, not his only job. His other job was to make sure she didn’t stop for KFC on the way back from a concert. She’d put a broken nail file to her throat if the driver didn’t stop for a half-dozen nine-piece boxes. She was a chicken hoover, if you know what I mean.”
“I know what you mean.”
“I know you know,” Suzy says, lowering her nightie, squirming with pleasure as she eases her behind back on the couch.
“Did I ever tell you about the time Larry got Shemp drunk and they put a hooker’s eye out in Canter’s?”
Only 5,000 times
.
“I never heard that one.”
“Here, have some more.”
Years go by.
Celeste Wesson
ROBERT WARD
has written six novels, including
Red Baker,
winner of the 1985 Pen West Award for Best Novel. His novel
Cattle Annie
and Little Britches
was made into a movie starring Burt Lancaster and Diane Lane. Ward has been a writer/ producer on the hit TV shows
Hill Street Blues, Miami Vice, New
York Undercover,
and
The Division.
His journalism and short fiction have appeared in
GQ, Rolling Stone,
Antaeus,
and many other magazines. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and son.