The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [64]
I came to the conclusion that the unsingable girl wasn’t good enough—partially because what person who could love me could be good enough? I resented her, devalued everything about her, felt sorry for myself, refused to think of her as my girlfriend. What am I doing with this awful girl?
We went out drinking; I bumped into some friends. I left the girl with the unsingable name in the corner as I flirted shamelessly with a friend of mine’s girlfriend. At one point I drunkenly reached out and pinched her nipple. My friend stood by trying to stop himself from punching my lights out. I shrugged at the girl with the unsingable name, and she followed me home.
She called me from work and said, “You don’t care about me. You think I’m lo-fi. You’re going to dump me.”
I would say, Why would you think that? No, no.
I beeped the guy at five. “This is Greg. Send me a numeric page. Do not leave a message. Send a numeric page, a numeric page, a NUMERIC PAGE.”
The buzzer rang—glorious buzzer, the drugs were here!—and he came up the stairs, looking like one of those polished, mellow neo-soul stars in his buttery-soft leather jacket. I came bounding down two flights to meet him. What a nice customer, I wanted him to think, he doesn’t even make me come up all five flights. What a good egg.
(Years later, clean, when I had Thai food delivered, I’d hear the buzzer, and my heart would involuntarily leap.)
He palmed me two bundles of dope. A bundle is ten bags, tiny glassine envelopes bound with a rubber band. For years I remembered, fantasized, about what those two bundles felt like, cupped in my hand: two little ruffles tied in rubber bands.
Greg liked having a minor rock star as a client. Sometimes he’d call back and say he had no plans to drive into Manhattan, then say, well, maybe he would, if he did, he’d call me. He always came. Once he gave me two bonus bags of a new brand called Krack-House ! to test. You hear warnings to take new brands slow, as they might be unexpectedly pure and kill you, but I sniffed them right up, never thinking that I could be so lucky. I mean, lucky to get fabulously pure heroin, not to die. Well, perhaps, on some level I was dimly aware of, lucky to die.
The drugs worked less and less well. I became more and more of an asshole. The unsingable girl yelled at me, “You don’t get high, you just get fucked up!”
She would go home to the Bronx and detox for the weekend, and I would stay home and detox, too. We reconvened a few days later and got high again, but it was never as satisfying as the first month.
Detoxing became routine. After a weekend without heroin, just weed and liquor, I could get a bundle and sniff it for a couple of days, and get high the way I used to, though soon I’d be back to maintenance using again. The gap closed: a weekend’s detox made a day being high; then I could be high for the time it took to sniff just a bundle. Then I’d detox for five days, sniff a bag, and be high for just a blissful fifteen minutes.
It was worth it to me. That’s all I had for delight in my life: my body stopped making any chemical that would make me feel good. Nothing was funny or pleasurable unless it was inside the window between detox and the re-onset of maintenance. I plotted longer detoxes: maybe if I stayed off it for two months, I could get high for a weekend? Six months of a grey, miserable slog through existence in exchange for a good week?
There was an episode of Behind the Music about the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Their guitar player was a dope fiend, and the show used some footage from a Dutch documentary depicting him as a bug-eyed, imbalanced wreck, mumbling about how heroin allowed him to keep a connection “to beauty.” His skin was yellow and grey. He was barely coherent.
The unsingable girl and I had both just detoxed when we saw it.
“Wow, doesn’t that make you jealous?” she asked, longingly.
Oh, good lord, yes, I said.
There was an episode of The Sopranos in which the Jersey gangsters go to Naples to finesse a smuggling connection. The youngest one, Chris, a junkie, sees