White Out (7 page)

“Where did you say you lived?” I asked.

“I, uh,” he swallowed. “I don’t really want to go home right now.”

I swallowed.

“I don’t really want to go home either,” I said softly, carefully, not meeting his eyes.

“So what do you want to do?”

“So what do you want to do?”

We said it together. We laughed shyly. I rubbed my knee. He rubbed his shoulder.

“It’s not so healthy to stop all at once,” he said.

“It’s a strain on the heart,” I said.

“And the liver,” he said.

“And the brain,” I said. We were pulling up to Pulaski, a great drive-through dope spot on the Westside.

“I don’t have any money,” he said.

“I don’t either,” I said. The stout baggy-shorts dealer walked up to my open window. He recognized me. I was a good customer.

“How many, yo?”

“Two,” I said. The dealer walked away. The guy next to me poked me in the shoulder.

“Man, I said I don’t have any.”

“Shut the fuck up,” I hissed.

The dealer came back. I had two single dollar bills in my palm. The dealer watched me close, looking puzzled. He reached slowly through the window with the dope in his fist. I looked normal. He looked me quick in the face and then jerked his hand back. I grabbed his fist, which slid out of my grip as his other fist hit the side of my head.

“Go man!” the guy beside me yelled. People were scrambling on the street. Coming out of bushes and from behind parked cars.

“Motherfucker!” the dealer screamed.

“Motherfucker!” screamed a tall kid within a red bandanna.

“Motherfucker!” screamed a fat, bald, middle-aged man.

“Motherfucker!” screamed the guy beside me. I sped off. Rolling up the window with one hand, holding my bloody nose with the other. Fifteen or twenty Pulaski folks scrambled in the rearview. The car zigzagged fifty feet up the block and ran up the curb onto the sidewalk.

“Motherfucker!” I yelled. I hit reverse and the car’s undercarriage screamed and sparked on the concrete.

A ten-year-old kid was the first to arrive. He hit the rear passenger window with a golf club and the glass cracked. The original dealer ran up fast and started pulling quick up and down, up and down on my locked door handle. Another guy ran over to my partner’s door and started doing the same. I saw a couple more ten-year-olds running up, laughing. One was dragging what looked like a dumbbell.

“Get those bitches!” someone yelled. I gunned the motor and the car revved and screeched.

“Oh God, they’re shooting!” the guy beside me yelled. “They’re shooting at us!”

The car scraped off the curb and I hit the gas, screeched around the corner onto Route 40, and started flashing past the stop signs and traffic lights. After maybe a minute I slowed down.

“They weren’t shooting,” I told the guy next to me. “You know how much heat that would bring? Shooting two white guys?”

“Fuck you, man. That was one of my spots. Now I can’t never go back.”

“You’re quitting, remember? Plus, you can totally go back there. We didn’t get away with any dope, did we? We’re still good customers.”

“And I ain’t no bitch,” he sniffled. I looked in the mirror. My nose was bleeding a little but otherwise I looked all right.

“I ain’t no bitch,” he muttered. He hit the dashboard. Hard.

“Ow!” he said.

“We need some money and I don’t mean maybe,” I mentioned.

It was one of those bright, clear Baltimore summer days that make the whole concept of “nice weather” meaningless and irrelevant. The cocksucker next to me needed me for a ride, if he was ever going to score, so I let him worry about the money. My job was to drive. I drove aimlessly while he mumbled and muttered. Whenever I saw a truck or a bus, I thought about crossing the double yellow lines and catching it head-on. A disappearance rush.

“OK,” he said finally. I really don’t remember that guy’s name. But now I could see he was both chubby and an addict, which usually doesn’t go together. His gold chain was both thin and fake, which also doesn’t usually go together. Everyone in this world is unique, my mother used to say.

“Head back to Fells Point and go down Eastern. My grandpa lives up there. He should have gotten his check yesterday.” He paused. “Unless Mom’s already snatched it up,” he added darkly.

That sounded sordid. But (a) I had made a promise to myself to quit dope, (b) it was bad for your heart to quit too abruptly, (c) my rear window was all smashed in, and (d) if I was ever going to get moving with quitting, I needed to get high right now. Right this very second.

There was a wheelchair on the lawn of the shitty concrete building where Grandpa lived. Fatty pushed it over to an open window, and used it to climb in. About three minutes later the front door opened and Fatty appeared waving happily.

“Come on in!” he said.

I put the car in park and walked in, ready for anything. Inside it was dark and urinous. Fatty motioned to a faded couch. I sat down gingerly. I noticed one end of the couch was piled with porn magazines. There were empty McDonald’s bags all over the floor. Grandpa eyed me suspiciously.

“Now Grandpa, this is the man I was telling you about,” Fatty yelled at the old man. “He’s here to collect the fee so I can go back to electrical school in the fall.”

They both looked at me. I wiped my nose, which had started bleeding again.

“Um, yes.” I said, “Your grandson is an unusually, um, promising electrician. We are all very excited to have him. But I do need to collect that fee today. Otherwise, he may have to go to jail.”

“What?” the old man said.

“You gotta talk louder,” Fatty told me, looking annoyed, “can’t you see he’s practically deaf?” He picked up a pencil and rapidly wrote something on the back of an old lotto ticket. I leaned over to read it.

The old man looked stupidly at the ticket for maybe a minute.

“I promised your mom. I won’t give you any more,” he said finally.

Fatty put his mouth practically to the oldster’s ear and yelled out:

“I NEED THAT SCHOOL MONEY RIGHT THIS MINUTE, GRANDPA!”

There’s no need to give all the details on this one. It’s not very uplifting. Suffice it to say we finally got sixty dollars out of the old man. Plus a handful of Percocet I snatched out of his medicine cabinet while Fatty was helping him into his wheelchair. Fatty had to promise we’d give the old guy a lift to the store when we got done taking care of the school fees. We left him sitting there forlornly on the lawn in his wheelchair.

His wheelchair did look real nice, though. It was brand new, practically. It had the red leather armrests. I bet he wouldn’t feel too bad if he did have to wheel himself to the store. Not in that thing. Its chrome spokes sparkled in my rearview. Sly old dog. I bet he wouldn’t feel too bad at all.

“He’s a smart old guy,” Fatty said.

“Nice ’chair,” I said.

“Heart of gold,” Fatty said.

We drove right back to Pulaski to cop. Fatty was nervous, but it was just like I said. I gave them two twenties and they gave me two white tops. No one had any hard feelings about earlier.

“So what happened last time?” asked the dealer casually, leaning on my window waiting for a ten-year-old to run up with the dope.

“I miscounted,” I said. He nodded. Just a mix-up, happens all the time on Pulaski.

The next morning I asked for the ReVia.

“Quitting is going great,” I told the nurse. “In fact, it’s a lot easier than I thought it would be. But I’d just feel better if I was on ReVia. Relapse-proof, like you said.”

“Well, OK,” the nurse said slowly. She checked my chart. “It has been over forty-eight hours, so you should be OK.” She looked up at the wall above my head. “Are you absolutely sure you have not had any dope in the past forty-eight hours? This could be painful if you’re not. You’re sure you are clean?”

I made a yes-type noise.

“All right, then. We’ll start you out with a very small dose. Over the next few days we’ll increase it, and then you can start taking the pills every morning.”

She took out a dropper and a bottle, and put a single drop of the clear liquid on my tongue. I swallowed savagely.
Good
, I thought.
Bring it. Kick that shit out of me.

I walked quickly to my car. Halfway there the ReVia hit me. When the drop touched my tongue, it seeped into my blood. When it hit my blood, it sped to my heart. My heart shot it into my brain.

Once inside my brain, tiny ReVia molecules began covering up all my dope receptors. Putting chemical gags in the open dope holes. I’m not an expert on the science. I went from high to fullblown twelve-hour withdrawal in a few minutes. Picture someone cutting trenches three inches wide and two inches deep all up and down your legs and back. And then pouring gasoline in the cuts. And then setting you on fire.

OK, I’m exaggerating. Junkies are famous for shamelessly exaggerating the pain of kicking. The sad truth is that the physical symptoms of withdrawal really aren’t so terrible. If you’ve ever had a bad case of the flu, you basically know what the physical symptoms are like.

Doesn’t seem to live up to the fuss, huh? In war, people get shot and travel for weeks through the jungle. They get gangrene and saw off their own feet and keep going. In the business world, people go to work with a bad cold. They sit hunched over their keyboards typing up reports with one hand while blowing their nose with the other. They don’t even write about it. They tough it out in silence. They make their co-workers sick with their germs. That’s their reward.

But soldiers with wounds and businesspeople with colds are bad comparisons. Because when the dope leaves the junkie it takes everything he has with it. The purely physical symptoms of withdrawal are unpleasant, but they don’t come close to explaining the relapse rate. Just try to put yourself in my shoes. You do the last of your dope and barricade yourself in your shitty apartment, saying “Never again!” About ten hours later your sense of who you are goes. A couple hours later your sense of where you are breaks down. Then your sense of why the hell you’re kicking disappears. Plus you feel like you’ve got the flu.

With no motive, no direction, and no name, in the no-time of deep withdrawal, the junkie’s brain is totally exposed to memory. To the memory disease.

When my vision cut out, imaginary dope vials posed under the light of paradise. When I opened my eyes, the impossible white spiral bliss was hovering two inches above my empty face. In my peripheral vision, I sensed the scenery and ambience of my first time. I bit down hard on the inside of my cheek.

I managed to drive back from the clinic and stagger into my building. Little white-top vials full of white powder shyly opalesced from the white walls of the lobby. I made it up to my apartment and collapsed writhing on the couch. Cat’s and Eva’s smiles twisted back and forth over the walls.

When you’ve got the flu, your brain releases endorphins to dull the pain and put you to sleep. Kicking, your bare nerves twist in the dry sockets. I corkscrewed into the hard cushions of my couch. Loneliness turned inside the pain and desire. I started to tell myself a story to try to go to sleep.

Some time later, I noticed there was a phone in my room in the castle. I slowly picked it up and dialed Eva’s number.

It rang three times.

“Hello,” she said.

Her real voice was too much. I sobbed through my clenched teeth.

“Is that you, Mike?”

“Y-y-yes.”

“Oh my God. Oh my God. Darling.”

White dope shone in the folds of her rich voice, in the shallows of her vowels.

Ten days later I was back at the Center for Addiction Medicine. They made you wait ten days between detoxes. Like the $150, the policy was designed to encourage the junkies to take detox seriously. I had the cash, though. I’d bought some expensive vitamins from Rite Aid with stolen checks. L-Carnitine 500 MG, $48.99. Three bottles. Vitamins are the best for buying with bad checks. They’re portable. They have relatively high cash value. Plus, and perhaps most importantly, they have a vague aura of healthy living. Vitamins don’t light up a store manager’s junkie radar the way cartons of cigarettes do.