Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [52]
Once when I crashed and I was out of cocaine—including everything I had hidden away in all my secret stashes—I panicked. I had to have something. So I decided to snort a lithium capsule. I broke it open and sniffed the white powder inside as if it were coke. It was horrible. My entire face burned. I felt like my nasal passages were on fire. I tried shoving water up my nose, but nothing worked, and it was hours before the pain subsided. I thought the walls of my nose were going to cave in.
Need for the drug began taking me deeper and deeper into a world that I never knew existed before. To get coke, I went with Raymond to places I would have been afraid to go otherwise.
One of our favorite cocaine stops was in the South Bronx, at a store about as big as a table. Upstairs was one of the most disgustingly filthy bathrooms I have ever seen. There was also a little room with a TV and a bed—and lots and lots of coke. It was piled up on a mirror. We would go there. I would wait. Raymond would do his deal. We would do a line, and then leave with enough to keep us satisfied for a while.
It was a frightening, dangerous, awful place. Once when Raymond took me there, there was a rifle in the upstairs room. When he left me there, and went off with the dealer, I became wild. I was so wired that I didn't even go for the pile of the stuff sitting right there in the open on the mirror. Instead, I went for the rifle. I would end this fucking horrible existence right then, I thought. I would blow my brains out, splatter them on the wall. I tried to put the gun to my head. But I couldn't manage it. I couldn't maneuver the rifle to my head with one hand, and reach the trigger with the other hand. Besides, I was shaking so hard I could barely keep the rifle still. I could hear Raymond and the dealer coming back up the stairs. I put the rifle down, and waited for them, trembling all over with fright.
The more drugs I did, the more suspicious people around me got. Dr. Rockland was beginning to question me more. Early in my therapy sessions I had told Dr. Rockland I was doing coke but I made light of it. I never told him how much I was really doing, or how important it had become to me. I told him it was just an occasional thing, a line now and then with friends simply for recreation. I could tell he was beginning to realize that wasn't true. By now, I was sometimes consuming nearly $1,000 a week worth of cocaine.
Gail Kobre—now Gail Kobre Lazarus—was growing concerned. Even with her new husband and her new house, she still tried to keep in touch with me. It wasn't the same as before, but still she would occasionally drop by. I had told her I was doing drugs. I even tried to get her to share a line with me. She indignantly refused. One afternoon she and I were together in the backyard of my parents’ house. I was lying on the hammock, and Gail was sitting on the rocks by the roses.
“I'll always be your friend, Lori,” she told me. “But I can't stand by and watch you ruining your life like this.”
As for my parents, I had tried hard to conceal it from them, but they weren't stupid. They were hoping they weren't seeing what they were seeing, but they were beginning to catch on. Raymond and I called each other as many times a day as we could. I called him at his work. He called me at home at midnight, and teed my parents off. I'd have to lie to my folks, that it was a wrong number, or else that it was my friend Nicole calling. I knew the lies weren't working.
13
Marvin Schiller Scarsdale, New York, June 1984-August 1984
At first, Nancy and I were delighted when Lori got herself a job. We didn't have any problem with our daughter working as a waitress.